Pamela Norris

Room Mates

The Woman Upstairs

By

Virago 304pp £14.99 order from our bookshop

In Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs, her protagonist Nora Eldridge is an angry woman. ‘It was supposed to say “Great Artist” on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say “such a good teacher/daughter/friend” instead,’ she rages, in an opening salvo that is both a riff on her own goodness and a defiant ‘fuck you’ to a callous world.

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