The First Floor

In 1987, Eleanor Mercer and Frank Calloway fell in love at thirty-four. By 1988, he was gone — not cruelly, not without reason, but gone in the specific way of a man who was not yet the person the moment required. Eleanor built a life. She married George, who was steady and good and who loved her completely. She raised a family, became a professor, wrote four celebrated books, and spent thirty-seven years not thinking about Frank Calloway more than once or twice a year.

Now she is sixty-nine, widowed, and standing at the threshold of a prewar building on West 81st Street. Frank Calloway's son is marrying her granddaughter. Frank is coming back to New York. And the building — designed by her oldest friend, Edward Whitmore, the year everything fell apart — has been waiting for both of them.

The First Floor is a love story for people who believe it is too late and are wrong. It is about second chances that arrive thirty-seven years after the first one, about the difference between the life you chose and the life you wanted, and about what it means to be sixty-nine and finally, with full information, prepared to want something completely.

Eleanor is not looking for a second chapter. She has a finished manuscript, a granddaughter's wedding to attend, and a clear-eyed understanding of what love costs and what it asks. Frank has spent twenty-two years in four countries building things and leaving them. He has come home because he ran out of reasons not to.

What unfolds between them is not the recovery of what they were — those two people at thirty-four do not survive the years between. It is something harder and more honest: two people in their late sixties, with all the information, deciding whether what remains between them is sufficient for the life they still have in front of them.

Deeply moving, quietly funny, and written with rare intelligence about the interior life of women over sixty, The First Floor is the final novel in The Building on 81st Street trilogy. It is also the story that all three books were always building toward — the original love story, the one Edward Whitmore built the community floor to hold, the one that needed thirty-eight years of a patient building before it was ready to be told.

For readers of Penelope Fitzgerald and Anne Tyler. For anyone who has ever loved someone at the wrong time. For everyone who suspects it might not be too late.