"Get ready to expand your sense of what Lorrie Moore—and a novel—can do." —Ron Charles, The Washington Post, on A Gate at the StairsFrom "one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation" (Caryn James, The New York Times)—a daring novel, her first in more than a decade, about love and death and what lies between and after. A ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things—seen and unseen.A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boardinghouse. A therapy clown and an assassin, both presumed dead, but perhaps not dead at all . . .With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay and singular wry humor and wisdom, Lorrie Moore has given us a magic box of longing and surprise as she writes about love and rebirth and the pull toward life. Bold, meditative, theatrical, this new novel is an inventive, poetic portrait of lovers and siblings, and of the stories we have been told, which take us through a trapdoor on an imagined journey to the tragic-comic landscape that is, unmistakably, the world of Lorrie Moore.
