THE BUSKER’S INHERITANCE: a Novel of Music and Hidden Inheritance

At sixteen, Eliska Novotná leaves her aunt's cold apartment in Prague with two things: a canvas bag with a broken zip, and her dead mother's violin. She has been told there is nothing else. No money, no property, no inheritance - only debt, and an aunt who took her in out of love. It isn't true. What follows is the education of a street musician. Eliska plays for coins beneath the Charles Bridge and learns which corners the police prefer to walk past. She plays in Dresden, Berlin and Leipzig, where an old caretaker remembers her mother and hands her a page of music with her own name written at the top. She plays in a Strasbourg bakery for bread still warm from the oven, and on the bridges of Lyon with three musicians who teach her that being good and being true are not the same thing. Marseille teaches her the laws of the market. Barcelona gives her twenty minutes and a breath. In Genoa, in Naples, in Florence, strangers hand her rosin, soup, a bed, a beat - and never once ask her name. All the while, under the tailpiece of her mother's violin, there is a small faded label she has read a thousand times without knowing what it means. Six years and two thousand miles later, Prague asks her to come home and read it. The Busker's Inheritance is a novel about the kindness of strangers, the music we make out of what we are given, and the distance between what you are owed and what you are worth.