The Woman Upstairs
On sale
2nd January 2014
Price: £9.99
Scotiabank Giller Prize, 2013
BY THE AUTHOR OF THE 2024 BOOKER LONGLISTED THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY
‘Messud is a breathtaking writer . . . a beautiful – and beautifully sustained – howl of fresh, fierce, furious rage’INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
Nora Eldridge has always been a good girl: a good daughter, colleague, friend, employee. She teaches at an elementary school where the children and the parents adore her; but her real passion is her art, which she makes alone, unseen.
One day Reza Shahid appears in her classroom: eight years old, a perfect, beautiful boy. Reza’s father has a fellowship at Harvard and his mother is a glamorous and successful installation artist. Nora is admitted into their charmed circle, and everything is transformed. Or so she believes. Liberation from 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.
‘Riveting . . . Messud is adept at evoking complex psychological territory’NEW YORKER
‘Messud’s prose is a delight . . . addictive, memorable, intense’ LIONEL SHRIVER, FINANCIAL TIMES
‘This is a faultless, suspenseful novel’MAIL ON SUNDAY
‘Quietly menacing’GOOD HOUSEKEEPING
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Reviews
Messud's prose is a delight . . . addictive, memorable, intense
This is a faultless, suspenseful novel
Messud is a breathtaking writer . . . a beautiful - and beautifully sustained - howl of fresh, fierce, furious rage
This is a faultless, suspenseful novel
Messud's prose is a delight ... addictive, memorable, intense
An unnerving portrait of obsession that makes you nervous about your mousiest of neighbours
Quietly menacing
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.
Riveting . . . Messud is adept at evoking complex psychological territory . . . She is interested in the identities that women construct for themselves, and in the maddening chasm that often divides intensity of aspiration from reality of achievement
Messud is a breathtaking writer ... a beautiful - and beautifully sustained - howl of fresh, fierce, furious rage.