Error 500 (Server Error)!!1500.That’s an error.There was an error. Please try again later.That’s all we know.

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Emperors 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 thirty-seven-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. Noras happiness explodes her boundaries, until Sirenas 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 ones passions.