The writer of the critically acclaimed play Out Late, Tim Turner makes his debut
as a novelist with The Reluctant Conductor, co-written with Moisey Gorbaty. This
powerful historical novel captures the hardship, oppression, hope and resilience
of a Jewish merchant and his family before, during and after World War II in the
Soviet Union.

In a world mired in bigotry and hate, Elazar, a young Jewish violinist in search of
redemptive love and transportive music, survives World War II in the Soviet Union.

Drifting back and forth between Ukraine and Uzbekistan between 1922 and 1944,
Elazar navigates wedding-night steam rooms and birch-branch floggings; rivers
of refugees and rivers of blood; lice and typhoid and refugee tent camps; horsedrawn carriage rides through betrayal and death and flattened shtetls; and the
small luxuries of the desperate, a simple plate of chicken and cabbage.

But in this literary symphony, there is always, always, the ebb and flow of music,
weaving in and out of a life lost in the terrifying wilderness, searching for family
and home.

The award-winning The Reluctant Conductor is the first novel in What the World
Owed Him, the Baranovsky family saga, rooted in the extraordinary true history of
Moisey Gorbaty’s family.

The story continues with The Prodigy’s Bargain, a new standalone historical novel
following Moisey Baranovsky from his childhood as a Jewish musical prodigy in
Soviet Moldova into adulthood.