Lorrie Moore is best known for her short stories; her passionate fans include Nick Hornby and Dave Eggers. She crafts intricate portraits of ordinary people living lives that have spun off the road at some point, people in the midst of figuring out where and how they went wrong and if they can find their way back. She combines beautiful sentences and deft imagery with sharp, perfectly tuned dialogue, a wry observer’s humour and deep pathos.

A Gate at the Stairs, her first novel in ten years, has all these qualities. Moore tackles American class, race, consumerism and the post-9/11 landscape against the backdrop of America’s mid-west (middle America in every sense), moving between an isolated farm town and the state’s university town. When student Tassie Keltjin takes a job as a part-time nanny to a well-off couple, she has little idea of the emotional and ethical freight it will carry. Back home, her high-school-age brother has been targeted by military recruiters, and is considering the armed forces as a way out of his bleak-seeming future.

This extraordinarily moving novel balances wonderful moments of social satire with an evocative coming-of-age story and a perfectly pitched warning about the dangers (moral and mortal) of how we live now.