The Stager

ADVERTISED.
A 1000-square-foot master bedroom suite, an expansive kitchen with new stainless steel appliances, an indoor gymnasium, and a swimming pool set on 1.5 meticulously landscaped acres in a tony, gated golf-course community.

‍UNADVERTISED.
A twisted, darkly comic backstory. Also, a mysterious stench, a meddling fifth-grader, and a fabulously destructive pet rabbit.

Most buyers take three to six minutes to decide if they like a home. As a Stager, Eve Brenner orchestrates the quick, shallow cosmetic fixes that make a house desirable to a prospective buyer. But when she steps into the faux-Flemish home of an investment banker and her tennis-star husband, the Stager finds herself slipping into a rabbit hole of emotional treachery from which she’s not sure she can escape.

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reviews

“The Stager is great fun, and Coll proves herself as shrewd a social anthropologist as she is a buoyant writer.”

The New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice

“Even brilliant social satires can be limited, but Susan Coll is so slyly perceptive, so attentive to nuanced relationships between people that she gets at how we conform life to the stories we tell ourselves.”

Chicago Tribune, Editor's Choice

“Coll’s vicious depiction of upper-upper-middle-class suburbia is often excruciatingly funny.”

Kirkus

“Susan Coll writes about her home town with an insider’s hilarious, mocking affection...Throughout this antic tale, Coll shows us what happens to people when they don’t feel heard or seen, when they wind up walking around as human versions of a house that’s been carefully denuded of the things that made it warm and welcoming — that made it a home.”

Washington Post - Julie Klam

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