About the Novel
The Glass Harmonica is the story of a woman who wants desperately to live fully but also be virtuous. Banished from her home for “immodesty,” Chjara Vallé (listen to pronunciation) is sold as a servant to an opium addict in Paris. 
Music paves the way for her to flee to the New World with her lover, Henry Garland, a rebel son of New England Puritans. Trouble awaits as they travel the byways of the young nation, she alternately seducing and scandalizing audiences with her playing of the glass harmonica and he clandestinely selling erotic literature and other items related to the “science of sexual knowledge.”
Praised by reviewers as “bawdy, geographically vast, and sensual indeed,” Dorothee Kocks’s The Glass Harmonica explores the intimate details of early American history to craft a novel of sensuality, ecstasy and music that reads at the pace of a thriller.
