Pru’s father was studying engineering, and when he graduated he went to work for GM. Her father was from Brooklyn, her mother from Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but they met in the middle of the country, in Ann Arbor, at a freshman mixer in 1944. It’s about the love between women and men, and children and parents about the things we give up in the face of adversity and about how to survive when life turns out differently from what we thought we signed up for.ġ? ?Growing up in Bexley, in the suburbs of Columbus, Pru had been drawn to the older boys, thinking they could take her far from home. Morningside Heights is a sweeping and compassionate novel about a marriage surviving hardship. Arlo, a wealthy entrepreneur who invests in biotech, may be his father’s last, best hope. Meanwhile, Spence’s estranged son from his first marriage has come back into their lives. One day, feeling especially isolated, Pru meets a man, and the possibility of new romance blooms. With their daughter, Sarah, away at medical school, Pru must struggle on her own to care for him.

The Great Man can’t concentrate he falls asleep reading The New York Review of Books. Thirty years later, something is wrong with Spence. But when she falls in love with and marries Spence Robin, her hotshot young Shakespeare professor, her life takes a turn she couldn’t have anticipated.

When Ohio-born Pru Steiner arrives in New York in 1976, she follows in a long tradition of young people determined to take the city by storm.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Book

Morningside Heights by Joshua Henkin