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Title details for The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud - Available

The Woman Upstairs

by Claire Messud
Cassandra Campbell
Audiobook
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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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    April 30, 2013

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780307913630
      • File size: 315819 KB
      • Duration: 10:57:57

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Cassandra Campbell superbly portrays Nora Eldridge's life of quiet desperation. Teacher, spinster, and dutiful daughter of an ailing father, Nora has the soul of an artist, but her existence has little personal meaning. Her late mother's voice and frustrations also echo in her heart. When Nora meets the Shahid family, she becomes enchanted with them: her charming student, Reza, who is confronted by bullies in the schoolyard; his artist mother, Sirena, who becomes Nora's studio partner and then outgrows their relationship; and his father, Skandar, a Harvard professor who embarks on long walks, and more, with Nora. Campbell portrays the Shahids with mesmerizing personalities and varied accents. Campbell's performance shares the author's passion for these characters and their intimate story. D.P.D. (c) AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 27, 2013
      It’s not that elementary school teacher Nora Eldridge’s life has gone particularly wrong, it’s that it hasn’t gone particularly right. She sold out her artistic dreams for success and stability, and become angry and full of self-loathing somewhere along the way. But when a young student, Reza Shahid, and his family enter her life, Nora finds herself changing as she is drawn into the Shahids’ world. Cassadra Campbell’s narration is pitch-perfect. She shifts back and forth between the different characters, lending all of them unique voices that capture their complexity. Her first-person narration is a delightful blend of restraint and emotion that will keeps listeners slightly anxious at all the right moments. By striking this balance, she captures the hard edge of Nora—and of the text—in a way that will resonate with listeners. A Knopf hardcover.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 18, 2013
      The gifted Messud, writing her way through the ages, has now arrived at a woman in her 40s–and it’s not pretty. Nora Eldridge, a schoolteacher who dreams of being an artist, is angry, cynical, and quietly desperate. Then she meets the Shahid family: Sirena, Skandar, and Reza, a student in Nora’s third-grade class at Appleton Elementary in Cambridge, Mass. When Sirena asks Nora to share an artists’ studio, Nora falls in love with each exotic Shahid in turn: Sirena, for her artistic vision; Skandar, for his intellectual fervor; and Reza, because he’s a perfectly beautiful child, bullied at school but magnanimous. In her previous books, Messud (The Emperor’s Children) has set individuals against the weight of kin; here is an individual who believes she’s found a vigorous self in the orbit of a dangerously charismatic family. But after freeing Nora from herself, the Shahids betray her, Sirena especially, cruelly exploiting a private moment of Nora’s newfound joy with an intimate work of art Sirena shows in Paris without Nora’s knowledge. As with other Messud characters, these too are hard to love; few would want to know the unpalatable Nora, so full of self-loathing, nor the self-important Shahids. Agent: Georges and Anne Borchardt, the Borchardt Agency.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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