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The Woman Upstairs: 'Messud's prose grabs the reader by the collar' New York Times Book Review
Claire Messud
Fiction, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
The stunning new novel from Claire Messud, author of The Emperor's Children, a top ten NYT bestseller.
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.
![The Burning Girl: '[Messud] is an absolute master storyteller' Los Angeles Times](https://hachette.imgix.net/books/9780708898611.jpg?auto=compress&w=195&h=307&fit=crop&fm=jpg)
Praise for The Woman Upstairs: 'Messud's prose grabs the reader by the collar' New York Times Book Review
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Messud is a breathtaking writer ... a beautiful - and beautifully sustained - howl of fresh, fierce, furious rage. - Independent on Sunday
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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. - The Economist
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Messud's prose is a delight ... addictive, memorable, intense - Financial Times - Lionel Shriver
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This is a faultless, suspenseful novel - Mail on Sunday
Claire Messud
Claire Messud is a recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The author of five other works of fiction including, most recently, The Burning Girl, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.
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