At the foot of the stairs

In one of the most powerful reflections on September 11, Lorrie Moore crafts a powerful and poignant novel about the anxiety and disconnection that gripped the United States after the attack on the Twin Towers, about the insidious racism in American society, and about the blindness of war. A finalist for the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize, At the Foot of the Stairs received critical and public acclaim: described as "brilliant and disturbing" by the British newspaper The Telegraph and considered her most powerful novel by The New York Times, where it remained on the bestseller list for over a hundred weeks, it was named one of the best books of 2009 by publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Financial Times. As the country warms to war in the Middle East, 20-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the daughter of a farmer famous for his potatoes, lives in a Midwestern college town, where she is attending college. A bit naive, but with her head buzzing with new ideas about music, literature, and philosophy, she shares an apartment with the bold and ever-absent Murph. Between semesters of university, she decides to work part-time as a nanny. After dropping off numerous resumes, she is finally hired by the mysterious and fascinating Thornwood-Brink family, a wealthy, liberal couple in their mid-forties, full of secrets, who are adopting a Black child. Despite having little experience or skill with children in the past, her bond with little Mary-Emma grows stronger every day, and she begins to care for and protect the little girl as if she were her own daughter. At the same time, she becomes involved with a classmate, a foreigner who entangles her in the tortuous paths of love. As the year passes, and she becomes increasingly immersed in these people's lives, Tassie begins to feel that her own existence in her family home is increasingly distant: her parents are quite fragile; Her brother, disoriented and lost in high school, considers joining the Army. Tassie then realizes she is becoming more and more of the outsider she feels she really is, and when fate and love take a dramatic and shocking turn, she will never be the same again.