In her dazzling new novel - her first in over a decade - Lorrie Moore turns her eye on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America. With her government quietly gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, a ‘half-Jewish’ farmer’s daughter from the plains of the Midwest, has come to the university town of Troy - a girl escaping her provincial home to encounter the complex world of culture and politics. When she takes a job as a part-time nanny to a couple who seem at once mysterious and glamorous, Tassie is drawn more deeply into the life of their newly adopted child and a household that steadily reveals its complications. With her past becoming increasingly alien to her - her parents seem older when she visits; her disillusioned brother ever more fixed on joining the military - Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she feels herself to be. As the year unfolds, love leads her to new and formative experiences, but it is then that the past and the future burst forth in dramatic and shocking ways. Refracted through the eyes of this memorable narrator, A Gate at the Stairs is a lyrical, beguiling and wise novel of our times.