The Woman Upstairs

Claire Messud 2013

Devastation Rating

Emotionally Ruined
betrayal literary fiction loss trauma

Our Take

Nora Eldridge has given her life to a quiet rage that she calls a life and Messud writes her without sympathy or condescension. The relationship at the centre becomes a slow-motion exploitation. The abuse is cultural, ambient, deeply gendered. This is a novel about what happens to ambition when the world refuses to take it seriously.

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