Alan Hollinghurst | The Stranger’s Child with Amor Towles | Rules of Civility
British author Alan Hollinghurst received the Man Booker Prize for his fourth book, The Line of Beauty, an elegiac account of cash, cars, cocaine, and coming out in 1980s London. Celebrated for his intrepid achievements in gay fiction since his debut with The Swimming-Pool Library, Hollinghurst's novels are enriched with a playful wit and a powerful eroticism. The Stranger's Child is a saga that begins in 1913, the last summer before the First World War, and spans the 20th century, depicting the intrusion of war and the unfolding drama of a literary conceit.
"A smart, witty, charming, dry martini of a novel," according to David Nicholls, Rules of Civility marks Manhattan investment banker Amor Towles' literary debut. This elegant New York City love letter opens on the last night of 1937 in a Greenwich Village jazz bar, where narrator Katey Kontent—a young woman of "formidable intellect, bracing wit, and uncommonly good legs"—happens upon a well-heeled banker who will multiply her social orbit and augment her professional credentials over the course of a watershed year. Towles evokes the ghosts of Fitzgerald, Capote, and McCarthy, as this chance encounter and its startling consequences detail how unrestrained decisions made in youth define life for decades to come.
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