2001, America is struggling to recover from the tragedy of September 11th. Twenty-year-old Tessie Keltyne, a farmer's daughter from the countryside, enrolls in a prestigious university, where culture shock and an unequal battle with Chaucer and Simone de Beauvoir await her. To earn extra money, she takes a job as a nanny for a family she finds extraordinary and disturbingly mysterious. The more Tessie becomes embroiled in these people's dramas, the further she drifts from her aging parents and her younger brother, a lonely and confused teenager considering joining the army after high school.
The Locked Staircase is a dark, piercing novel by Lorrie Moore about the cruelties of growing up, the poison of hypocrisy, and a society crumbling at the seams, gripped by paranoia, apathy, and a desperate search for meaning in everyday life in the shadow of a great catastrophe.

Author: Lorrie Moore