A woman raging against the machine

The Woman Upstairs

**By Claire Messud**

**Virago, €17.65**

**Reviewed by Joanne Hayden**

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It would be wrong to define the narrator of Claire Messud's new novel solely by her anger - even though from the opening sentence, Nora Eldridge, seems properly raging. "How angry am I? You don't want to know. Nobody wants to know about that."

She is flagging her anger but, more importantly, she is drawing attention to its unacceptability in ...