The Door by the Staircase
Twelve-year-old Mary Hayes can’t stand her orphanage for another night. But when an attempted escape through the stove pipe doesn’t go quite as well as she'd hoped, Mary fears she’ll be stuck in the Buffalo Asylum for Young Ladies forever.
The very next day, a mysterious woman named Madame Z appears at the orphanage requesting to adopt Mary, and the matron’s all too happy to get the girl off her hands. Soon, Mary is fed a hearty meal, dressed in a clean, new nightgown and shown to a soft bed with blankets piled high. She can hardly believe she isn’t dreaming!
But when Mary begins to explore the strange nearby town with the help of her new friend, Jacob, she learns a terrifying secret about Madame Z’s true identity. If Mary’s not careful, her new home might just turn into a nightmare.
Award-winning author Katherine Marsh draws from Russian fairytales in this darkly funny middle-grade fantasy novel
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Katherine Marsh
Katherine Marsh has a gift for finding the heartbeat in history, the hidden corners, overlooked voices, and deeply human moments that echo into the present. Her stories, often set against sweeping backdrops of political unrest and social change, don’t just recount the past, they ask what it means to live through it, especially when you're young and searching for your place in a world that doesn't always make sense.
Before she was crafting award-winning novels, Marsh was steeped in stories of a different kind. As a journalist and editor, she learned how to chase truth through the noise, a skill that now gives her fiction its remarkable sense of urgency and clarity. Whether writing about a Syrian refugee hiding beneath the streets of Brussels in Nowhere Boy or exploring the trials of immigration and identity in The Lost Year, she doesn’t shy away from hard questions. Instead, she meets them head-on with empathy and grace.
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