A Gate at the Stairs

'You can sit back and have the time of your life reading A Gate at the Stairs.' Observer 'The most irresistible contemporary American writer.' New York Times Book Review 'One of the funniest writers alive' Dave Eggers 'Hilarious and distressing, entertaining and wise' Roddy Doyle 'Moore's a writer you don't quit.' Guardian With America quietly gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, a 'half-Jewish' farmer's daughter from the plains of the Midwest, has come to university - escaping her provincial home to encounter the complex world of culture and politics. When she takes a job as a part-time nanny to a couple who seem at once mysterious and glamorous, Tassie is drawn into the life of their newly-adopted child and increasingly complicated household. As her past becomes increasingly alien to her - her parents seem older when she visits; her disillusioned brother ever more fixed on joining the military - Tassie finds herself becoming a stranger to herself. As the year unfolds, love leads her to new and formative experiences - but it is then that the past and the future burst forth in dramatic and shocking ways. Refracted through the eyes of this memorable narrator, A Gate at the Stairs is a lyrical, beguiling and wise novel of our times.

Lorrie Moore is the award-winning author of five story collections, four novels, a collection of criticism and a children's book. A Gate at the Stairs was shortlisted for the 2010 Orange Prize, now the Women's Prize, and she has received numerous accolades from the Lannan Foundation, the National Books Critics Circle, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. After serving for almost three decades as the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Moore is now the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.