Visible City - 9780544483880

“Read Visible City. Tova Mirvis’s graceful yet vigorous New York novel is about the half-inadvertent window-peeping that city life enables, and where it can lead.” —New York Magazine

After chaotic days of wrangling and soothing her young children, Nina spends her evenings spying on the quiet, contented older couple across the street. But one night, through her same window, she spies a young couple in the throes of passion. Who are these people, and what happened to her symbol of domestic happiness? Soon, Nina crosses paths with both couples on the streets of her Upper West Side neighborhood and, as anonymity gives way to different forms of intimacy, all begin to confront their own desires and disappointments. Shrewdly and artfully, Mirvis explores the boundaries between our own lives and the lives of others. From its lavish ghost subway stations to its hidden stained-glass windows,Visible City conjures a New York City teeming with buried treasures.

“An utterly perfect, deeply moving evocation of contemporary Manhattan [that] reminded me of Paula Fox and Laurie Colwin, and also those master chroniclers of the privileged classes, Wharton and Fitzgerald . . . Brilliant.” —Joanna Smith Rakoff, Salon.com

“Mirvis’s meticulously choreographed novel surprises and moves us.” —New York Times Book Review

TOVA MIRVIS is the author of The Outside World and The Ladies Auxiliary, a national bestseller. Her essays have appeared in various anthologies and newspapers, and her fiction has been broadcast on NPR. She is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fiction Fellowship and lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her three children.