Myra is a Manhattan psychotherapist. But when she learns that her phobia-addled son is moving back to New York with his wife and child, she responds with a mother's heart rather than the prudence that has guided her career. Myra invites her son's family to share her brownstone and hires Eva, from a Jewish community deep in the Amazon, as a nanny and housekeeper. Eva seems like the perfect addition, but as she reveals more of herself, the felicitous arrangement turns ominous. Slowly and inexorably, the relationship becomes too close, too entangled—and, ultimately, terrifyingly destructive.

With Tinderbox, the psychoanalyst and novelist Lisa Gornick gives us a gripping story of the tragedy of good intentions—a haunting mystery of hidden traumas and a searingly perceptive exploration of power and love.

Lisa Gornick is the author of A Private Sorcery, a novel. Her stories have appeared in Agni, Confrontation, The Massachusetts Review, Slice, and other journals; have received awards, including Best American Short Stories Distinguished Story of the year; and have been named a finalist in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open and a winner of the Summer Literary Seminars Unified Literary Contest. Her essays have been published in The Huffington Post, The Sun, and various psychoanalytic journals. She has a BS from Princeton, and a PhD in clinical psychology from Yale, and is a graduate of the writing program at New York University and the psychoanalytic training program at Columbia, where she is currently on the faculty.