In her best-selling story collection, Birds of America (“[it] will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability” —James McManus, front page of The New York Times Book Review ), Lorrie Moore wrote about the disconnect between men and women, about the precariousness of women on the edge, and about loneliness and loss.

Now, in her dazzling new novel—her first in more than a decade—Moore turns her eye on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America, on the insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war, and the recklessness thrust on others in the name of love.

As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwestern daughter of a gentleman hill farmer—his “Keltjin potatoes” are justifiably famous—has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir.

Between semesters, she takes a job as a part-time nanny.

The family she works for seems both mysterious and glamorous to her, and although Tassie had once found children boring, she comes to care for, and to protect, their newly adopted little girl as her own.

As the year unfolds and she is drawn deeper into each of these lives, her own life back home becomes ever more alien to her: her parents are frailer; her brother, aimless and lost in high school, contemplates joining the military. Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she felt herself to be, and as life and love unravel dramatically, even shockingly, she is forever changed.

This long-awaited new novel by one of the most heralded writers of the past two decades is lyrical, funny, moving, and devastating; Lorrie Moore’s most ambitious book to date—textured, beguiling, and wise.

From the Hardcover edition.

洛丽·摩尔，1957年生于纽约州，毕业于康奈尔大学创意写作系，1983年凭第一部短篇小说集《自助》奠定其在美国文坛的声誉。之后她相继出版短篇小说集《就像生活》《美国鸟人》，以及长篇小说《字谜游戏》《谁将开办青蛙医院？》和《门在楼梯口》等。她的短篇小说《你也很丑》被约翰·厄普代克收入他主编的《二十世纪美国最佳短篇小说》。

洛丽·摩尔曾在威斯康辛大学麦迪逊分校教授创意写作30年。2013年起开始在范德堡大学任教。此外她还在密歇根大学、普林斯顿大学等教授创意写作。

2006年，洛丽·摩尔被推选为美国艺术暨文学学会成员。

她最近的一部作品是出版于2014年的短篇小说集《树皮》。