Elena Delbanco has recently retired after teaching for 27 years at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Before moving to Ann Arbor, she worked at Bennington College in Vermont, where she and her husband, the writer Nicholas Delbanco, together with the late John Gardner, founded the Bennington Writing Workshops. Delbanco has long been engaged in the world of classical music. Her father was the renowned cellist Bernard Greenhouse (of the Beaux Arts Trio), who owned the Countess of Stainlein ex-Paganini Stradivarius violoncello of 1707. The imagined fate of that instrument, upon her father’s death, inspired THE SILVER SWAN, her first novel.

Books by Elena Delbanco

The Silver Swan

by Elena Delbanco - Fiction

Alexander Feldmann is a revered and sought-after performer. After years of searching, he acquires a glorious cello, the Silver Swan, a rare Stradivarius masterpiece long lost to the world of music. Mariana is Alexander’s only child, and the maestro has large ambitions for her. By the age of 19 she emerges as a star cellist in her own right, and is seen as the inheritor of her father’s genius. Mariana believes the Silver Swan will be hers one day, until a stunning secret from her father’s past entwines her fate and that of the Silver Swan in ways she never could have imagined.