A Stairway to Paradise — Madeleine St. John

From the Booker Prize nominee, a wise novel that takes a clear-eyed look at the profound nature of love and the inconvenience of desire. This smart novel ensnares three thirty-something Londoners in a moral quandary of emotion, desire, and discontent. While Alex, a successful Fleet Street journalist, has surrendered to a cold, calmly professional marriage for the sake, he says, of his two children, his old friend Andrew, an amiable academic recently back from America, has left his ex-wife and the daughter he adores on the other side of the world. Although neither Andrew nor Alex can offer the enchanting, elusive Barbara what she thinks she wants of romance, both men, in escalating degrees of desperation, try - to comic if not entirely happy consequence. "[St John] writes with grace, fluidity and emotion.... She is a wise writer, and a humane one, and A Stairway to Paradise is a beautiful book." - Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World; "Deftly written and delightful.... A deeply moral novel.... St John's prose is spare but rich.... With her taut writing, she never once fails to convey the emotional intensity of her characters' lives." - Commonweal; "[An] elegant dagger of a novel, painfully on the mark." - Cleveland Plain Dealer.