A Gate at the Stairs [Paperback]

Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award
Finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction
Chosen as a Best Book of the Year byThe New York Times Book Review,The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, Kansas City Star, Financial Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch,andReal Simple

Twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the daughter of a gentleman farmer, has come to a university town as a student. When she takes a job as a part-time nanny for a mysterious and glamorous family, she finds herself drawn deeper into their world and forever changed. Told through the eyes of this memorable narrator,A Gate at the Stairsis a piercing novel of race, class, love, and war in America.

“Profound. . . . Get ready to expand your sense of what [Moore]—and a novel—can do.” —The Washington Post Book World

“An indelible portrait of a young woman coming of age in the Midwest in the year after 9/11…. Moore has written her most powerful book yet.” —The New York Times

“A miracle of lyric force, beautiful and beautifully constructed, with a comic touch that transforms itself to a kind of harrowing precision.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
 
“A Gate at the Stairshas the power to make you laugh and cry, sometimes almost simultaneously.” —The Miami Herald
 
“Lorrie Moore’s writing is everything that life is, funny and heart-breaking—and rich.” —The Denver Post
 
“Moore may be, exactly, the most irresistible contemporary Ameri­can writer: brainy, humane, unpretentious and warm.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Fifty years from now, it may well turn out that the work of very few American writers has as much to say about what it means to be alive in our time as that of Lorrie Moore.”l#g