Crossroads On 57th Street

Miriam Rosen spent thirty years being called nice.

Nice hands. Nice technique. Reliable - the worst compliment a piano teacher can hear. At fifty-six, she teaches students who are just as nice as she is, in a rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side, and has spent a lifetime watching people less hungry than her walk away with everything she wanted.

Then, one October night, something changes. Not slowly. Not by degrees.

She disappears. What comes back is someone the critics don't have a word for - and by the time they find one, she's already further than anyone expected her to go: Carnegie Hall, the Grammys, a name that stops needing an explanation.

But New York keeps close accounts. A journalist who recognizes a certain kind of story when he hears one. A woman who has watched this happen before and knows exactly how it ends. And someone else - quiet, patient, always a little too close - who is keeping very careful track of what she owes.

Someone is watching what she's become. Someone always is.

And there is always, eventually, a price for getting exactly what you wanted.

Crossroads at 57th Street is a story about talent, envy, and the particular cruelty of almost - about what it costs to finally be seen after thirty years of being merely nice, and whether anything is worth what Mimi Rosen is about to find out it costs. Told through Mimi's own unraveling and the reporter who can't stop pulling at the threads of her transformation, it's a novel about New York at its most glittering and most merciless, and about the moment every gifted, overlooked person secretly wonders about: what would you actually do, if someone offered you the thing you wanted most?