The Apartment
at the Top
of the Stairs

★ ★ ★ ★ ★4.8 from 142 readers · Indie Bound starred review

For nine years, Tobi lived alone in a fourth-floor walk-up above a Polish bakery in a slowly changing Brooklyn neighborhood. The new tenants have re-tiled the kitchen. The bakery downstairs has become a vape shop. Her mother is calling more than usual. And in the apartment directly across the airshaft, a woman has begun playing the same record every Sunday morning at 7:14 a.m.

Adaeze Okonkwo's quiet, watchful first novel is a meditation on what a building remembers and on the polite, terrible work of staying still while everything around you turns. Written across four years and three apartments, it announces a new American novelist with the patience and texture of an older one.

HardcoverSmyth-sewn, sewn boards

304 ppFSC text stock

Set in HudsonAdobe Caslon Pro & metal

March 2026First edition · Spring list

978-1-947-238-12-4ISBN

5.5 × 8.25Trim

$22.00

Hardcover · Ships within 3 business days

Also available as paperback ($16) and signed first edition ($45) · Find at your local bookshop →

— A short excerpt

From Chapter One

Tobi did not believe she was the kind of person who would still be living, at thirty-eight, in the apartment she had moved into at twenty-nine. She would have said so, if anyone had asked. No one asked. She made her bed in the same room she had made her bed in the morning of her first job, and the morning of her last job, and the morning her father called from Lagos to say her mother had been in a small accident, only the kind of small accident that mothers are in.

The bakery downstairs opened at five. The radiators in the kitchen, the bedroom, and the front room came on at five-fifteen. By five-thirty the smell of yeast and the smell of warm metal had become a single smell, and that smell, more than anything else, was what Tobi understood to mean home.

She had a list of things she was going to do, when she finally moved. The list was on a Post-it on the inside of the medicine cabinet. The Post-it was nine years old.

— from The Apartment at the Top of the Stairs, ch. 1, p. 3

— Notices

What the critics said

The New York Review of Books

"A first novel of unusual self-possession. Okonkwo writes the way the best older writers do — without hurry, without strain, and with a kind of moral attention that is almost Russian."

Lila Marsden · NYRB · March 2026

Bookforum

"Tobi is one of the great recent characters in American fiction — watchful, dryly funny, mostly silent — and the apartment that Okonkwo builds around her is as alive as the woman herself. A quietly seismic debut."

Eze Mensah · Bookforum · Spring 2026

The Atlantic

"The novel of staying still, finally — and rendered in such fine, even prose that staying still becomes the whole emotional engine. Okonkwo is a major voice arriving fully made."

R. Pena · The Atlantic · April 2026

The Paris Review

"Like the best of Mavis Gallant, Adaeze Okonkwo can hold a sentence flat as a window-pane and let weather move across it. This is a novel that knows how to wait."

S. Kallin · Paris Review · Issue 247

— About the author

Adaeze Okonkwo

Adaeze Okonkwo is the author of Borrowed Saints (Your Business, 2025) and the chapbook Twelve Lagos Mornings (Tin House, 2022). Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and The Sewanee Review. She lives in Brooklyn.

Born in Lagos and raised between Lagos, Houston, and Brooklyn, Adaeze worked as a line cook for nine years before publishing her first book. The Apartment at the Top of the Stairs is her first novel.

The Apartmentat the Topof the Stairs

From Chapter One

What the critics said

Adaeze Okonkwo

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The Apartment
at the Top
of the Stairs