The Woman Upstairs - Hardcover

Messud, Claire

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 184408731X ISBN 13: 9781844087310

Publisher: Virago, 2013

Synopsis

I'm halfway through my life, or maybe more, and I'm finally awake to the fact that it's in my hands alone. I've believed in other people, had faith, been patient, waiting for my moment -- enough, already. Who have I been kidding?

Nora Eldridge has always been a good girl: a good daughter, colleague, friend, employee. She teaches at an elementary school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the children and the parents adore her; but her real passion is her art, which she makes alone, unseen. To be an artist is, she is sure, her real destiny.

Then one day Reza Shahid appears in her classroom: eight years old, a perfect, beautiful boy. Reza's parents are on a year-long visit from Paris: Skandar, his father, has a fellowship at Harvard; Sirena, his mother, is a glamorous installation artist apparently on the brink of huge success.

For that magical year, Nora is admitted into their charmed circle, and everything is transformed. Or so she believes. As it turns out, her liberation from the benign shackles of her old life is not quite what it seems, and she is about to suffer a betrayal more monstrous than anything she could have imagined.

About this title

Review:

Gone Girl meets The Bell Jar (Glamour US)

Corrosively funny . . . Fifty years ago, Simone de Beauvoir faulted creative women for their unwillingness to 'dare to irritate, explore, explode.' Two generations later, anger this combustible still feels refreshing (Megan O'Grady Vogue US)

Terrifyingly perceptive . . . Nora Eldridge is a kind of Madame Bovary for our time, someone who dreams not of romantic passion but of personal fame, in which the envy of the less fortunate figures importantly. . . . One particular triumph of The Woman Upstairs is that Messud's heroine is so sympathetic, and so eloquent and convincing, that the depth of her illusions is not always apparent. . . . Because Messud has lent Nora her own outstanding gifts as a writer we cannot help believing what she tells us, at least for a while (Alison Lurie The New York Review of Books)

Heartfelt and profound. . . . an absolute page-turner, from its grab-you-by-the-collar opening to its final rumination on the creative uses of anger. . . . it may well be the first truly feminist (in the best, least didactic sense) novel I have read in ages-the novel, candid about sex and the intricacies of female desire, that Virginia Woolf hoped someone would write, given a room and income of her own. An extraordinary novel, a psychological suspense story of the highest sort that will leave you thinking about its implications for days afterward (Bookforum)

Exhilarating velocity, fury, and wit . . . an acid bath of a novel. Messud's scorching social anatomy, red-hot psychology, galvanizing story, and incandescent language make for an all-circuits-firing novel about enthrallment, ambition, envy, and betrayal. A tour de force (Booklist)

"How angry am I?" Nora Eldridge rhetorically asks in her opening sentence. "You don't want to know." . . . An astonishing feat of creative imagination: at once self-lacerating and self-pitying, containing enough truth to induce squirms. Brilliant and terrifying (Kirkus)

Exquisite and immersive . . . Nora Eldridge has to be one of the richest and most fully human characters to come along in years . . . The prose here never calls undue attention to itself, and The Woman Upstairs dazzles without outwardly trying. It also solidifies Messud's place among our greatest contemporary writers (Miami Herald)

That rare work of fiction seemingly destined to become a cultural benchmark, a byword even (Wall Street Journal)

Comedy, pathos, sadness: nothing seems beyond her. Her new book has all this-and more. The Woman Upstairs is not a pretty read, but that is precisely what makes it so hard to put down (Economist)

Addictive . . . wonderfully dark and dynamic (Independent)

Book Description:

The Woman Upstairs is a searing novel of huge emotional force, from the bestselling author of The Emperor's Children.

About this edition

• Publisher: Virago
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 184408731X
• ISBN 13: 9781844087310
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320