The House Uptown: A Novel

by Melissa Ginsburg Narrated by Emily Shaffer

Overview

Melissa Ginsburg's The House Uptown is an emotional coming-of-age novel about a young girl who goes to live with her eccentric grandmother in New Orleans after the death of her mother.

Ava, fourteen years old and totally on her own, has still not fully processed her mother's death when she finds herself on a train heading to New Orleans, to stay with Lane, the grandmother she barely remembers.

Lane is a well-known artist in the New Orleans art scene. She spends most of her days in a pot-smoke haze, sipping iced coffee, and painting, which has been her singular focus for years. Her grip on reality is shaky at best, but her work provides a comfort.

Ava's arrival unsettles Lane. The girl bears an uncanny resemblance to her daughter, whom she was estranged from before her death. Now her presence is dredging up painful and disturbing memories, which forces Lane to retreat even further into her own mind. As Ava and Lane attempt to find their way and form a bond, the oppressive heat and history of New Orleans bears down on them, forcing a reckoning neither of them are ready for.

A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books

"Ginsburg's brilliance is on full display in The House Uptown. By giving us these layered, complicated characters, all suffering from previous traumas, Ginsburg reveals how the past keeps reaching toward us, and what we'll do to stay out of its reach. It's a book that breaks you down, even though you can't put it down." - Kevin Wilson, NYT bestselling author of Nothing to See Here

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"A magnetic, deftly-crafted tale about the ties that bind family and found-family across generations. Ginsburg is a master of depicting the heartbreaking inner lives of people aching for connection in a world spinning apart." - Maurice Ruffin, author of We Cast a Shadow

"Ginsburg's brilliance is on full display in The House Uptown. By giving us these layered, complicated characters, all suffering from previous traumas, Ginsburg reveals how the past keeps reaching toward us, and what we'll do to stay out of its reach. It's a book that breaks you down, even though you can't put it down." - Kevin Wilson, NYT bestselling author of Nothing to See Here

"Melissa Ginsburg's page-turner is a devastatingly simple trap: characters so beguiling you settle in for a charming coming-of-age fable before realizing the spring is snapping shut on an inexorable and satisfying calamity. The theme is the-past-isn't-dead-it-isn't-even-past, but painted not with Faulkner's heavy hand so much as with the crisp ingenuity of Ross Macdonald." - Jonathan Lethem, bestselling author of The Feral Detective

Library Journal

10/01/2020

In debut author Andrews's Who Is Maud Dixon?, Florence Darrow, assistant to pseudonymous author Maud Dixon (actually Helen Wilcox), awakens in a hospital after a terrible accident with no memory of the event and Helen missing in action—so why not take over her life (75,000-copy first printing)? In the pseudonymous Finlay's buzzy Every Last Fear, NYU student Matt Pine learns that his entire family has perished while vacationing in Mexico, and the FBI and State Department are questioning the accidental gas leak story put forth by the local police. Flynn, who as a YA author writes as L.E. Flynn, goes adult with The Girls Are All So Nice Here, as Ambrosia Wellington recalls the not-so-nice thing she did one night with former best friend Sully and receives ever more threatening missives about an event she thought was history (150,000-copy first printing). In The House Uptown, Ginsburg's follow-up to Sunset City, 14-year-old Ava winds up in New Orleans after her mother's death, living with a bohemian artist grandmother who finds Ava's presence a reminder of dark things past (50,000-copy first printing). In the latest from Lovering (Tell Me Lies), things prove to be To Good To Be True as starry-eyed Skye Starling blissfully accepts a marriage proposal from her sophisticated older boyfriend, actually a devious skunk whose dark secrets the story backtracks 30 years to reveal (150,000-copy first printing). How does upright Parisian cop Alice end up on a park bench in Central Park, New York, chained to a Dublin musician she doesn't know and in possession of a gun significantly missing a bullet? Read top French author Musso's Central Park to find out. Following Oliva's The Last One, Forget Me Not features a lonely woman still trying to make sense of her past—she was born to replace a dead sibling, escaped the 20-acre compound in Washington State where she had been pretty much abandoned, and at age 12 suddenly faced an incomprehensible world. Already grabbed by 17 territories worldwide, Sten's Scandi-set The Lost Village features documentary filmmaker Alice Lindstedt's efforts to chronicle the mining town whose inhabitants—save for a dead woman and an abandoned newborn—all vanished on a single day in 1959. But bad things keep happening on set (100,000-copy first printing).

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177418575
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	03/16/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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