Myra leads a life that, from the outside, many would have cause to envy: An analyst in Manhattan, she enjoys an engaging and prosperous career, seeing patients from the comfort of her brownstone and writing a thoughtful meditation on the teleology of love. Beneath that professional veneer, though, her family is coming apart. When her grown son, his wife, and their young son move in with her, the obligations and latent hostilities of life at home threaten to cause permanent rifts.

Hoping to ease the burden, Myra hires Eva, a Peruvian immigrant newly arrived in New York, as a nanny. But as Eva insinuates herself into the family, becoming ever more invaluable but behaving ever more strangely, what seemed at first like a felicitous arrangement becomes an even greater strain --- and as resentments begin to accrue, the household reaches a disastrous boiling point.

Lisa Gornick is a practicing psychologist and a first-rate novelist, and in TINDERBOX, her extraordinary powers of observation are on display as never before. This is a generous, acute, compassionate novel about the inevitable tangle of guilt and bitterness when the bonds of family collide with the complexities of money and privilege.