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The Woman Upstairs Audiobook
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Publisher Description
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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“Cassandra Campbell superbly portrays NoraEldridge’s life of quiet desperation…Campbell portrays the Shahids withmesmerizing personalities and varied accents. Campbell’s performance shares theauthor’s passion for these characters and their intimate story.”
— AudioFile
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“Engrossing…Messud raises questions about women’s still-circumscribed roles and the price of success.”
— People (A People’s Pick) -
“Riveting.”
— New Yorker -
“A psychological and intellectual thriller.”
— Los Angeles Times -
“Messud’s crystallization of how it feels to crash into a midlife reckoning that resonated most and haunted me in the days after finishing her mesmerizing novel.”
— Huffington Post -
“[A] powerful psychological thriller…It is also a supremely well-crafted page-turner with a shocker of an ending.”
— Boston Globe -
“The Woman Upstairs is first rate: It asks unsettling, unanswerable questions…[and] the characters are fully alive.”
— Denver Post -
“Hypnotic. In Nora, Messud has conjured a self-contradictory yet acutely familiar character.”
— Salon -
“The novel gives a voiceless woman a chance to howl.”
— Christian Science Monitor -
“A passionate and skillful description of female ambition and women artists at work.”
— New Republic -
“With exhilarating velocity, fury, and wit, the superlative Messud immolates an iconic figure—the good, quiet, self-sacrificing woman—in this acid bath of a novel, while taking on the vicissitudes of family life and the paradoxes of art…A tour de force.”
— Booklist (starred review) -
“Messud persuasively plunges us into the tortured psyche of a conflicted soul…Brilliant and terrifying.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) -
"The Woman Upstairs is Messud’s greatest novel.”
— Dennis Haritou, author of Three Guys One Book
Awards
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Selected for the May 2013 Indie Next List
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A 2013 New York Times Editor’s Choice
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Longlisted for the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize
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A New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of 2013
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A New York Times bestseller
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An Amazon Top 100 Book of 2013
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A Los Angeles Times bestseller
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One of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2013 in Fiction
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A 2013 Washington Post Top 10 Book
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A Publishers Weekly bestseller
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A Huffington Post Best Book of 2013
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Finalist for the 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
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A 2014 ALA Notable Book for Adult Ficiton
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A People Pick of the Week
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A 2013 Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Award Nominee
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About Claire Messud
Claire Messud was educated at Cambridge and Yale. Her novels, When the World Was Steady and The Hunters were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her second novel, The Last Life, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and Editor’s Choice at The Village Voice. Three of her books were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship, and is the current recipient of the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.
About Cassandra Campbell
Cassandra Campbell has won multiple Audie Awards, Earphones Awards, and the prestigious Odyssey Award for narration. She was been named a “Best Voice” by AudioFile magazine and in 2018 was inducted in Audible’s inaugural Narrator Hall of Fame.