Buy used £3.29

FREE delivery 16 - 18 August. Details

Select delivery location

Used: Good | Details

Sold by The Cotswold Library

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

See this image

Follow the author

Claire Messud

The Woman Upstairs Hardcover – 30 May 2013

by Claire Messud (Author)

3.4 1,989 ratings

See all formats and editions

I'm halfway through my life, or maybe more, and I'm finally awake to the fact that it's in my hands alone. I've believed in other people, had faith, been patient, waiting for my moment -- enough, already. Who have I been kidding?

Nora Eldridge has always been a good girl: a good daughter, colleague, friend, employee. She teaches at an elementary school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the children and the parents adore her; but her real passion is her art, which she makes alone, unseen. To be an artist is, she is sure, her real destiny.

Then one day Reza Shahid appears in her classroom: eight years old, a perfect, beautiful boy. Reza's parents are on a year-long visit from Paris: Skandar, his father, has a fellowship at Harvard; Sirena, his mother, is a glamorous installation artist apparently on the brink of huge success.

For that magical year, Nora is admitted into their charmed circle, and everything is transformed. Or so she believes. As it turns out, her liberation from the benign shackles of her old life is not quite what it seems, and she is about to suffer a betrayal more monstrous than anything she could have imagined.

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Virago
Publication date

30 May 2013
Dimensions

16.2 x 3 x 23.9 cm
ISBN-10

184408731X
ISBN-13

978-1844087310
See all details

Claire Messud
1,989
Paperback
47 offers from £1.19
Claire Messud
11
Hardcover
26 offers from £1.00
Claire Messud
228
Paperback
3 offers from £3.07
Claire Messud
455
Paperback
26 offers from £1.00
Claire Messud
2,042
Paperback
32 offers from £0.01
Claire Messud
31
Hardcover
11 offers from £7.48

Product description

Review

Gone Girl meets The Bell Jar (Glamour US)

Corrosively funny . . . Fifty years ago, Simone de Beauvoir faulted creative women for their unwillingness to 'dare to irritate, explore, explode.' Two generations later, anger this combustible still feels refreshing (Megan O'Grady Vogue US)

Terrifyingly perceptive . . . Nora Eldridge is a kind of Madame Bovary for our time, someone who dreams not of romantic passion but of personal fame, in which the envy of the less fortunate figures importantly. . . . One particular triumph of The Woman Upstairs is that Messud's heroine is so sympathetic, and so eloquent and convincing, that the depth of her illusions is not always apparent. . . . Because Messud has lent Nora her own outstanding gifts as a writer we cannot help believing what she tells us, at least for a while (Alison Lurie The New York Review of Books)

Heartfelt and profound. . . . an absolute page-turner, from its grab-you-by-the-collar opening to its final rumination on the creative uses of anger. . . . it may well be the first truly feminist (in the best, least didactic sense) novel I have read in ages-the novel, candid about sex and the intricacies of female desire, that Virginia Woolf hoped someone would write, given a room and income of her own. An extraordinary novel, a psychological suspense story of the highest sort that will leave you thinking about its implications for days afterward (Bookforum)

Exhilarating velocity, fury, and wit . . . an acid bath of a novel. Messud's scorching social anatomy, red-hot psychology, galvanizing story, and incandescent language make for an all-circuits-firing novel about enthrallment, ambition, envy, and betrayal. A tour de force (Booklist)

"How angry am I?" Nora Eldridge rhetorically asks in her opening sentence. "You don't want to know." . . . An astonishing feat of creative imagination: at once self-lacerating and self-pitying, containing enough truth to induce squirms. Brilliant and terrifying (Kirkus)

Exquisite and immersive . . . Nora Eldridge has to be one of the richest and most fully human characters to come along in years . . . The prose here never calls undue attention to itself, and The Woman Upstairs dazzles without outwardly trying. It also solidifies Messud's place among our greatest contemporary writers (Miami Herald)

That rare work of fiction seemingly destined to become a cultural benchmark, a byword even (Wall Street Journal)

Comedy, pathos, sadness: nothing seems beyond her. Her new book has all this-and more. The Woman Upstairs is not a pretty read, but that is precisely what makes it so hard to put down (Economist)

Addictive . . . wonderfully dark and dynamic (Independent)

Book Description

The Woman Upstairs is a searing novel of huge emotional force, from the bestselling author of The Emperor's Children.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Virago (30 May 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 184408731X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1844087310
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.2 x 3 x 23.9 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 1,728,664 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 129,933 in Contemporary Fiction (Books)
- 130,283 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer reviews:
3.4 1,989 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Claire Messud

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

3.4 out of 5

1,989 global ratings

5 star
4 star
3 star
2 star
1 star

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from United Kingdom

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

maggiefb

fun house not funny

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 May 2013

Verified Purchase

I was initially put off by this angry woman in the first chapter. She turns out to be Nora Eldridge, age 42, who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has recently worked as a teacher of 8-year-olds. But I persisted, waiting to learn why she was so angry.
Nora does not have a partner or children. She aspires to be an artist, though what she produces doesn't seem to be particularly creative or original. When a foreign family move to Cambridge for a year in connection with the university Nora becomes involved with them: she takes more than a professional interest in the liitle boy Reza, who is in her class; she then agrees to share a studio with his mother Sirena, an artist who creates 'installation'. Her obsession with this family encompasses all three members; Reza, Sirena and her husband Skandar, and seems to take over her life.
There are frequent references to 'the woman on the stairs' whom nobody notices or understand, and the 'fun house', which is meant to be fun but is actually scary and unreal, and which Nora is trying to escape. She frequently laments that she means less to her new friends than they to her, and finally discovers what she actually does mean to them!
I finished this book but found I couldn't really engage with any of the characters or feel sympathetic towards Nora. In the books I love the protagonists usually have far more justification for their anger.

13 people found this helpful

Helpful

Norman Housley

a lyrical, reflective and insightful novel

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 January 2014

Verified Purchase

I was predisposed to enjoy this novel because its theme is one of my favourites, the narrator's obsession with all the members of a charismatic and talented family - what you might call the Brideshead fixation. Messud adds some really intriguing and clever ideas to the genre, dealing with creativity, ambition, duty, regret, and the complexity of sexual attraction. She explores these in a beautiful prose style and with many resonant touches. It is a very mature book, she takes time to explore things, occasionally too much so, but overall it's one of the most rewarding reading experiences I've had for years. The Cambridge, Mass. setting is nicely woven into the book.
I am still pondering over the ending, which comes as a shock and turns the rest of the book on its head. At first I took against it, because it just didn't seem to be in character. I still find it saddening and disturbing, but at the same time I can see how it flows from some of the book's development. What I don't like, though, is the message that the author seems to be sending in the book's opening and closing sentences that anger can be positive and liberating. Messud would perhaps say that this isn't her message but the narrator's, and if that is the case it could be taken to show that at the end of a painful experience Nora remains deluded.
It's not often that one reads a novel that sets the mind going in so many different directions, in addition to being such an enjoyable book to read. Messud deserves all the praise she gets for her achievement.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Neasa MacErlean

A disappointing shaggy dog story

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 July 2013

Verified Purchase

This book is now famous for its beginning: "How angry am I? You don't want to know." And then the narrator (who is the woman upstairs), 37-year old teacher Nora, tells you the long story of her anger. She got gradually angrier in her normal life - as she felt dismissed to the sidelines (upstairs) as a modern-day spinster. And then she ends up even more cheesed off as she recounts in the main plot line of the piece - about a family she meets and falls in love with. Yesterday, I heard the author, Claire Messud, interviewed on anger on the Radio 4 programme "Woman's Hour" and I bought the book because it was recommended in the Financial Times. So she is becoming something of an icon of our times in the anger world. I must be missing something as I found the tome rather obvious and tedious. And, although she did become ever-angrier, she did not really vent her anger. There are lots of descriptions of her art studio and her relationship with the family. So if you like long, slow descriptions and less of a punchy plot then maybe this is for you.

12 people found this helpful

Helpful

I made myself finish it

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 March 2014

Verified Purchase

I really struggled with THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS. The novel is narrated by Nora, a woman in her late thirties who teaches at a primary school. Nora is the woman upstairs - a single woman who, in her own words, would be seen to be in her spinsterhood. At the beginning of the novel, she tells us that she is angry, but she is not the sort of person to really show it. From the synopsis the reader comes to the book expecting her to experience some kind of betrayal; Nora is telling us about how she makes friends with one particular small family. This family has her in its thrall; she feels motherly to the young boy, she seems to admire and want to be like the mother and she is attracted to the husband. So, it is not hard to guess that the betrayal revolves around these people. What I struggled with is that there was remarkably little that actually happened throughout this 300 page novel. I don't want to give away the 'climax' of the novel but I won't give anything away by saying that it is very poor.
This was one book which made me think at the end of it, why did I bother?

20 people found this helpful

Helpful

Lulabelle

Uuuming and aaaaahing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 September 2014

Verified Purchase

This is one of those books that kept popping up. It was mentioned everywhere online. amazon kept on recommending it to me, and in the end I decided I may as well give it a go.
The characters are well written. A lot has been said about the main character and how likeable she is. I certainly didn't dislike, I found her very honest and real.
My only issue and it really is a small one. Is that, I didn't really relate to the story. Possible it's my age, maybe it's because the choices I've made in my life have been so different. Maybe we aren't really meant to relate to her. I mean I haven't been to Hogwarts either but I still 'got' Harry Potter.
Either way, I think it's a book worth reading even if I am slightly unsure how I feel about it

Helpful

Amazon Music Stream millions of songs	AbeBooks Books, art & collectables	ACX Audiobook Publishing Made Easy	Amazon Web Services Scalable Cloud Computing Services

Audible Download Audiobooks	Book Depository Books With Free Delivery Worldwide	DPReview Digital Photography	Goodreads Book reviews & recommendations

Amazon Home Services Experienced pros Happiness Guarantee	IMDb Movies, TV & Celebrities	Kindle Direct Publishing Indie Digital & Print Publishing Made Easy	Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands

Amazon Warehouse Deep Discounts Open-Box Products	Amazon Business Service for business customers	Whole Foods Market We Believe in Real Food

Follow the author

The Woman Upstairs Hardcover – 30 May 2013

Popular titles by this author

Product description

Review

Book Description

From the Inside Flap

About the Author

Product details

About the author

Claire Messud

Customer reviews

Top reviews from United Kingdom

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.