Longing tells the story of the greatest artistic couple in history, Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck. They met when she was eight years old and he was seventeen, drawn together first by music and then by their passion for each other. Drawing on their letters and remarkably frank journals, J. D. Landis writes of Clara and Robert's enforced separations, their marriage, their artistic triumphs and failures, and finally their shared devotion to, and love for, a young genius who both came between them and brought them together for the last time.

Longing was a New York Times Notable Book. It was also named by The Guardian (London) as the second finest novel about music (the first being Thomas Bernhard's Loser, a judgment with which Mr. Landis is delighted to concur).