A Gate at the Stairs

In her best-selling story collection, Birds of America ("[it] will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability" --James McManus, front page of The New York Times Book Review), Lorrie Moore wrote about the disconnect between men and women, about the precariousness of women on the edge, and about loneliness and loss.Now, in her dazzling new novel--her first in more than a decade--Moore turns her eye on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America, on the insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war, and the recklessness thrust on others in the name of love.As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwesterndaughter of a gentleman hill farmer--his "Keltjin potatoes" are justifiably famous--has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir.Between semesters, she takes a job as a part-time nanny.The family she works for seems both mysterious and glamorous to her, and although Tassie had once found children boring, she comes to care for, and to protect, their newly adopted little girl as her own.As…

Prize history

• Women's Prize for Fiction 2010 Shortlist