The 10 Best Books of 2009
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-12-10 10:47
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A GATE AT THE STAIRS
By Lorrie Moore
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95.
Moore’s captivating novel, her first in more than a decade, is set in 2001 and narrated by a Wisconsin college student who hungers for worldly experience and finds it when she takes a job baby-sitting for a bohemian couple who are trying to adopt a mixed-race child. Meanwhile, she drifts into a love affair with an enigmatic classmate and feels the pressing claims of her own family, above all her affectless younger brother, who enlists in the military after 9/11.