A touching inventive novel about belonging and loss” (People) from the critically beloved New
York Times bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife and Inland I marveled at the subtle beauty
and precision of Obreht’s prose. . . Read in the context of today’s conflicts and injustices
climate emergencies and political and racial divisions—together more dystopian than any
dystopian novel—the book surprised me most with its undercurrent of hope.”—Jessamine Chan
author of The School for Good Mothers in The New York Times (Editors’ Choice) There’s the
world you can see. And then there’s the one you can’t. Welcome to the Morningside. After being
expelled from their ancestral home in a not-so-distant future Silvia and her mother finally
settle at the Morningside a crumbling luxury tower in a place called Island City where
Silvia’s 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 and because the
once-vibrant city where she lives is now half-underwater. Silvia knows almost nothing about the
place where she was born and spent her early years nor does she fully understand why she and
her mother had to leave. But in Ena there is an opening: 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 Ena’s
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 building: 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.
Silvia’s mission to unravel the truth about this woman’s 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 tell—and the stories we refuse to tell—to make sense of where we
came from and who we hope we might become.
