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Alfred A. Knopf
May 2013
On Sale: April 30, 2013
254 pages ISBN: 0307596907 EAN: 9780307596901 Kindle: B00A1O4L50 Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction Family Life
From the New York Times best-selling author of The
Emperor’s Children, a masterly new novel: the riveting
confession of a woman awakened, transformed and betrayed by
a desire for a world beyond her own.
Nora Eldridge,
an elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
long ago compromised her dream to be a successful artist,
mother and lover. She has instead become the “woman
upstairs,” a reliable friend and neighbor always on the
fringe of others’ achievements. Then into her life arrives
the glamorous and cosmopolitan Shahids—her new student Reza
Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale, and
his parents: Skandar, a dashing Lebanese professor who has
come to Boston for a fellowship at Harvard, and Sirena, an
effortlessly alluring Italian artist.
When Reza is
attacked by schoolyard bullies, Nora is drawn deep into the
complex world of the Shahid family; she finds herself
falling in love with them, separately and together. Nora’s
happiness explodes her boundaries, and she discovers in
herself an unprecedented ferocity—one that puts her beliefs
and her sense of self at stake.
Told with urgency,
intimacy and piercing emotion, this brilliant novel of
passion and artistic fulfillment explores the intensity,
thrill—and the devastating cost—of embracing an authentic life.
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