From the critically beloved, New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger's Wife and Inland, a magical novel of mothers and daughters, displacement and belonging, and myths both old and new.
Theres the world you can see. And then theres the one you cant. Welcome to the Morningside.
After being expelled from their ancestral home, Silvia and her mother finally settle at the Morningside, a crumbling luxury tower in Island City where Silvias aunt Ena serves as the superintendent. Silvia feels unmoored in her new life because her mother has been so diligently secretive about their family's past. Silvia knows almost nothing about the place where she was born and spent her early years, nor does she know why she and her mother had to leave. But in Ena there is an a person willing to give the young girl glimpses into the folktales of her demolished homeland, a place of natural beauty and communal spirit that is lacking in Silvia's lonely and impoverished reality.
Enchanted by Enas stories, Silvia begins seeing the world with magical possibilities and becomes obsessed with the mysterious older woman who lives in the penthouse of the Morningside. Bezi Duras is an enigma to everyone in the She has her own elevator entrance and leaves only to go out at night and walk her three massive hounds, often not returning until the early morning. Silvias mission to unravel the truth about this womans life, and her own haunted past, may end up costing her everything.
Startling, inventive, and profoundly moving, The Morningside is a novel about the stories we telland the stories we refuse to tellto make sense of where we came from and who we hope we might become.