The Woman Upstairs

A brilliant novel by Canada’s own award-winning Claire Messud, author of the New York Times bestselling The Emperor’s Children.
The Woman Upstairs is the riveting confession of a woman awakened, transformed and betrayed by passion and the desire for a world beyond her own.
Nora Eldridge, a 37-year-old elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was on the verge of disappearing into the background until Reza Shahid walked into her classroom. Nora is quickly drawn into the complex world of the Shahid family. Soon she finds herself falling in love with them, separately and together, and happiness shatters her boundaries–until ambition leads to betrayal.
Written with intimacy and piercing emotion, this urgently dispatched story of obsession and artistic fulfillment explores the thrill–and the devastating cost–of giving in to one’s passions. The Woman Upstairs is a masterly story of America today, of being a woman and of the exhilarations of love.