A Gate at the Stairs
'Not a single sentence is wasted.' Elizabeth Day
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $10.99
-
- $10.99
Publisher 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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Moore (Anagrams) knits together the shadow of 9/11 and a young girl's bumpy coming-of-age in this luminous, heart-wrenchingly wry novel the author's first in 15 years. Tassie Keltjin, 20, a smalltown girl weathering a clumsy college year in "the Athens of the Midwest," is taken on as prospective nanny by brittle Sarah Brink, the proprietor of a pricey restaurant who is desperate to adopt a baby despite her dodgy past. Subsequent "adventures in prospective motherhood" involve a pregnant girl "with scarcely a tooth in her head" and a white birth mother abandoned by her African-American boyfriend both encounters expose class and racial prejudice to an increasingly less na ve Tassie. In a parallel tale, Tassie lands a lover, enigmatic Reynaldo, who tries to keep certain parts of his life a secret from Tassie. Moore's graceful prose considers serious emotional and political issues with low-key clarity and poignancy, while generous flashes of wit Tessie the sexual innocent using her roommate's vibrator to stir her chocolate milk endow this stellar novel with great heart.
