The Woman Upstairs
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Narrated by:
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Cassandra Campbell
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By:
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Claire Messud
About this listen
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 37-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.
©2013 Claire Messud (P)2013 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Fantastic - one of those seemingly small stories that so burst with rage and desire that they barely squeeze between hard covers. The prose is impeccable.... Messud writes about happiness, and about infatuation - about love - more convincingly than any author I’ve encountered in years. She fills [her] protagonist with an inner life so rich and furious that you will never again nod hello in the hall to ‘the woman upstairs’ without thinking twice.... Is Nora’s entrancement erotic, or bigger and stranger than sex? I’m not telling. Read the book." (Lionel Shriver, National Public Radio, "All Things Considered")
"Bracing...not so much the story of the road not taken as that of the longed-for road that never appeared.... Nora’s anger electrifies the narrative, and Messud masterfully controls the tension and pace. In this fierce, feminist novel, the reader serves as Nora’s confessor, and it’s a pleasure to listen to someone so eloquent, whose insights about how women are valued in society and art are sharp." (Jenny Shank, Dallas News)
"An elegant winner of a novel...quietly, tensely unfolding.... Remarkably, Messud lets us experience Nora’s betrayal as if it were our own, and what finally happens really is a punch in the stomach. Highly recommended." (Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal)
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Douglas Petersen may be mild-mannered, but behind his reserve lies a sense of humor that seduces beautiful Connie into a second date...and eventually into marriage. Now, almost three decades later, they live more or less happily in the London suburbs with their moody seventeen year-old son, Albie. Then Connie tells him she thinks she wants a divorce. The timing couldn’t be worse. Connie has planned a month-long tour of European capitals, a chance to experience the world’s greatest works of art as a family, and she can’t bring herself to cancel. And maybe going ahead is for the best anyway? Douglas is privately convinced that this landmark trip will rekindle the romance in the marriage, and might even help him to bond with Albie. Narrated from Douglas’s endearingly honest, slyly witty, and at times achingly optimistic point of view, Us is the story of a man trying to rescue his relationship with the woman he loves, and learning how to get closer to a son who’s always felt like a stranger.
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Great novel - my favorite in years
- By Mark on 07-21-15
By: David Nicholls
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A Narrow Door
- By: Joanne Harris
- Narrated by: Alex Kingston, Steven Pacey
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
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Rebecca Buckfast has spilled blood to reach this position. Barely 40, she is just starting to reap the harvest of her ambition. As the new regime takes on the old guard, the ground shifts. And with it, the remains of a body are discovered.
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Optional heading
- By TanyaB on 01-17-22
By: Joanne Harris
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The Wife
- A Novel
- By: Meg Wolitzer
- Narrated by: Dawn Harvey
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The moment Joan Castleman decides to leave her husband, they are 35,000 feet above the ocean on a flight to Helsinki. Joan's husband, Joseph, is one of America's preeminent novelists, about to receive a prestigious international award, and Joan, who has spent 40 years subjugating her own literary talents to fan the flames of his career, has finally decided to stop.
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A bit of a downer
- By Jody Cox on 08-01-18
By: Meg Wolitzer
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Boy, Snow, Bird
- By: Helen Oyeyemi
- Narrated by: Susan Bennett, Carra Patterson
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty - the opposite of the life she' s left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman. A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she' d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy' s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white.
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For Literary Lovers
- By M. Shipe on 04-25-14
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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Language Arts
- By: Stephanie Kallos
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
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Charles Marlow is a Seattle English teacher who instructs his students to expand their worlds through language. Lately, however, with one child off to college and the pressure from his ex-wife to make plans for their severely autistic son who's about to age out of the system, he prefers the company of the ghosts he turns up in the storage boxes in his crawl space.
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The beauty of the broken
- By SJ Evans on 04-27-18
By: Stephanie Kallos
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Gold Dust
- By: Kimberley Freeman
- Narrated by: Jennifer Vuletic
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Three women linked by their blood, their dreams...and their sins. From Leningrad in the '70s to America and London in the present day, Kimberley Freeman's new novel follows the lives of two sisters, Lena and Natalia, and their cousin, Sofi, as they move away from Russia and all they have known. Despite promising to always take care of each other, a pact to meet every winter is shattered as their lives change and long-held resentments begin to surface. Can that resentment turn to hatred? To murder?
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It's just not the same without Caroline Lee
- By Maria on 12-04-17
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In Malice, Quite Close
- By: Brandi Lynn Ryder
- Narrated by: Michael Kramer
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French ex-pat Tristan Mourault is the wealthy, urbane heir to a world-renowned collection of art - and an insatiable voyeur enamored with Karen Miller, a 15-year-old from a working-class family in San Francisco. Deciding he must 'rescue' Karen from her unhappy circumstances, Tristan kidnaps her and stages her death to mask his true crime.
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In malice,Quite close
- By Wendy on 09-06-11
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One Amazing Thing
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- Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
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Winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry and an American Book Award for her short stories, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni explores themes of women, immigration, and her vibrant Indian culture to great effect. Divakaruni expands on these ideas in One Amazing Thing, a project long in the making and full of electric prose.
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An ok way to kill some time
- By R.Reader on 11-07-12
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Russian Winter
- A Novel
- By: Daphne Kalotay
- Narrated by: Kathleen Gati
- Length: 14 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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In Russian Winter, the beautiful debut novel by critically acclaimed writer Daphne Kalotay, a famed ballerina’s jewelry auction in Boston reveals long-held secrets of love and family, friendship and rivalry, harkening back to Stalinist Russia. Called “tender, passionate, and moving” by Jenna Blum, the New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Save Us, Russian Winter is a perfect choice for fans of the novels of Debra Dean (The Madonnas of Leningrad), Ann Patchett (Bel Canto), and Ian McEwan (Atonement).
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Read this review; Sophisticated and wonderful!
- By Cookie on 01-15-12
By: Daphne Kalotay
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An Available Man
- A Novel
- By: Hilma Wolitzer
- Narrated by: Fred Sullivan
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Edward Schuyler - a modest and bookish 62-year-old science teacher - is widowed, he finds himself ambushed by female attention. There are plenty of unattached women around, but a healthy, handsome, available man is a rare and desirable creature. Edward receives phone calls from widows seeking love, or at least lunch, while well-meaning friends try to set him up at dinner parties. The problem is that Edward doesn’t feel available. He’s still mourning his beloved wife, Bee, and prefers solitude and the familiar routine of work, gardening, and bird-watching.
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Lovely book, easy read, wonderful characters
- By Molly-o on 02-17-12
By: Hilma Wolitzer
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The Finishing School
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- By: Joanna Goodman
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One spring night in 1998, the beautiful Cressida Strauss plunges from a fourth-floor balcony at the Lycée Internationale Suisse with catastrophic consequences. Loath to draw negative publicity to the school, a bastion of European wealth and glamour, officials quickly dismiss the incident as an accident, but questions remain. Was it a suicide attempt? Or was Cressida pushed? It was no secret that she had a selfish streak and had earned as many enemies as allies in her tenure at the school.
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this book was just ok
- By Josh Fields on 02-26-20
By: Joanna Goodman
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Losing the Light
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- By: Andrea Dunlop
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When 30-year-old Brooke Thompson unexpectedly runs into a man from her past, she's plunged headlong into memories she's long tried to forget about the year she spent in France following a disastrous affair with a professor.
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Right book for right time
- By Pamela G. on 08-06-18
By: Andrea Dunlop
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What listeners say about The Woman Upstairs
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Debra Johnson
- 06-10-15
Could not put it down!
Enjoyed it so much! I can't believe this was the subject material that turned into a mini-storm over likable characters. Of course Nora is likable. And not likable. It's a brilliant portrait of a whole person, including a great deal of contemplation on the artificial nature of personal charm. Brilliant novel. I loved every minute.
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- Karen M. Downes
- 08-27-13
BOOORING
I read and listen to a lot of books but I rarely write reviews because taste is so subjective. I like narrater Cassandra Campbell but not for this novel. I picture a harder charactor with a harsher attitude. It comes off as a Hallmark movie of the week and I think it was meant to be deeper. More like Sundance Channel after hours.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Joan Ifland
- 10-01-16
Betrayal Defined
This is a book of complex themes that don't fully emerge until the last few pages. It is a book about self-imposed limitations and how those limitations can lead us into foolishness. But the author ultimately folds the limitations in on themselves until they become a way to break through. This is a fascinating book, beautifully constructed.
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- KP
- 06-29-13
Loved It!
I loved this book! Messud writes about themes that many people, especially women, can relate to: the female artist who sublimates her art for a mundane life and career, the middle age woman who feels invisible, the envy and longing for an exciting life and a feeling of belonging, the loneliness that can plague a single woman. Her protagonist, Nora, deals with all these issues. In many reviews I’ve read, the book has been criticized because of Nora’s passivity, her negativity, her poor choices in life, and her unreliability as a narrator. Although I agree that these things do describe Nora, they actually are the reasons that I loved the book. Why should Massud write about a “perfect” character? It’s Nora’s flaws that make for an interesting plot development.
Others have criticized the book for not having much of a plot. I totally disagree here, too. The plot is her developing relationship with the Shahid family and the build up of tension about an event to which Nora has alluded to in the beginning that will eventually bring that relationship to a crashing halt. I was mesmerized and could hardly put the book down until I read about the event and finished the book. “The event” is mind-blowing, and it makes the reader re-think all that has come before in light of it.
I found the idea of using Nora’s best friend, Didi, as a foil to be interesting. It is Didi who lets the reader know, if we were in doubt, how far off the mark Nora has gone in her life. As Nora checks in with her periodically, it is Didi who tries to put her back on track. This goes on several times until Nora decides not to confide in Didi any more. This is when we know that Nora has gone “off the grid”, at least emotionally, in terms of a rational response to the Shahids. That’s when it gets really interesting. There’s a lot to talk about in this book!!
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11 people found this helpful
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- Lynn
- 06-28-14
Interesting, to a point
What made the experience of listening to The Woman Upstairs the most enjoyable?
I enjoyed the story, for the most part. But I thought the ending was bizarre and not worth the journey. It left me with a sense that the woman upstairs definitely needs therapy.
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- Allison
- 03-06-14
Highly Recommend - Completely Engrossing
This book was so interesting and so good. I loved the character development and the ride it took me on. There are themes of obsession, betrayal, sadness, and what it means to sacrifice your dreams for a strictly sensible life. You probably won't like the main character, she is seriously crazy, but she is fascinatingly aware of her craziness. I clearly understood her and weirdly related to a lot of her confusion about the world. Her frankness and desperate need to reveal her story to the reader was an awesome experience. I listened to this book twice, back to back. It disturbed me and I wanted to make sure I really understood why. I also just wanted to experience the amazing writing a second time. The narrator is literally perfect, too. Highly recommend this book.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Janet Kornblum
- 07-12-15
Inside and out will transform you
Be careful. This book packs a punch you may not expect. worth the time investment. Keep reading.
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- MerGriffin
- 09-26-18
Beautiful portrayal of a women overlooked finding her own voice
This novel creates a beautiful portrayal of a women overlooked finding her own voice.
Well read by Cassandra!
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- Leigh
- 05-07-13
Absolutely AMAZING!
I LOVE this! Twisted, dark, honest, and so intimate. This is a must have! The end will shock you...
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5 people found this helpful
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- Sally O'Briant
- 07-14-15
Completely absorbing
Superb book with narration to match. Cassandra Campbell brings the characters to vivid life with all their complexities.
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