A Gate at the Stairs
Lorrie Moore

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synopsis

With her government 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 the university town of Troy – a girl escaping her 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 more deeply into the life of their newly-adopted child and a household that steadily reveals its complications. With her past becoming 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 the stranger she has at times imagined herself to be. 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.

Lorrie Moore

is the award-winning author of the story collections Self-Help, Like Life and Birds of America, and the novels Anagrams and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? She teaches English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.