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The 2011 Award

 

Moore

Moore2

A Gate at the Stairs

by Lorrie Moore

 

 

 

Nominated by:

  • Richland County Public Library, USA
  • Miami-Dade Public Library System, USA
  • Lincoln City Libraries, USA.
  • Milwaukee Public Library, USA.
  • Bergen Offentlige Bibliotek, Norway
  • Biblioteques de Barcelona, Spain.
  • Serres Central Public Library, Greece.

 

Publisher of Nominated Edition:

Faber & Faber, UK

Alfred A. Knopf, USA

 
The complete A-Z listing of nominated authors
ABOUT THE BOOK

 
Twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the daughter of a gentleman farmer, has come to a university town as a student. When she takes a job as a part-time nanny for a mysterious and glamorous family, she finds herself drawn deeper into their world and forever changed. Told through the eyes of this memorable narrator, A Gate at the Stairs is a piercing novel of race, class, love, and war in America. 

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(From Publisher).
 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lorrie Moore is the author of the story collections Birds of America, Like Life, and Self-Help and the novels Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams. Her work has won honors from the Lannan Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Irish Times International Prize for Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and the PEN/Malamud Award. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. 

LIBRARIANS' COMMENTS

Excellent prose, distinct feelings, deals with the present condition of modern America through the eyes of the heroine, who happens to be of mixed race.

An almost rites of passage story of a young student / part time nanny, who experiences 3 traumas within a year. A strong mixture of tragedy, humour and close observation.

An amazing novel which explores the limitations and insufficiencies of love with an emotional precision.

The author uses a poetic precision of language to probe war, racism and betrayal.

Moore's graceful prose consider serious emotional and political issues with low-key clarity and poignancy and generous flashes of wit.

The books tells the story of twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, a Midwestern college student, in a year in which she works as a nanny with a family adopting a biracial child. In the aftermath of 9/11, the coming-of -age story brings out serious emotional and political issues through Tassie's witty observations of the world around her.

This novel, set on a Midwestern farm just after September 11th, explores the limitations of love, amid challenges of racism and the war on terror.

 

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