From the New York Times best-selling author of The Emperor's Children a brilliant new novel: the riveting confession of a woman awakened transformed and betrayed by passion and desire for a world beyond her own. Nora Eldridge a thirty-seven-year-old elementary school teacher in Cambridge Massachusetts who long ago abandoned her ambition to be a successful artist has become the "woman upstairs " a reliable friend and tidy neighbor always on the fringe of others' achievements. Then into her classroom walks Reza Shahid a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale. He and his parents--dashing Skandar a Lebanese scholar and professor at the École Normale Supérleure; and Sirena an effortlessly glamorous Italian artist--have come to Boston for Skandar to take up a fellowship at Harvard. When Reza is attacked by schoolyard bullies who call him a "terrorist " Nora is drawn 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 until Sirena's careless ambition leads to a shattering betrayal. Told with urgency intimacy and piercing emotion this story of obsession and artistic fulfillment explores the thrill--and the devastating cost--of giving in to one's passions.
