Lorrie Moore
Description
'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 Y
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ork 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.
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