Amor Towles' New Book

One of my guilty pleasures is reading People Magazine. There, I admitted it. No more secret shame.

As I was flipping through this week's issue, I saw that our classmate Amor Towles gets a great shout out for his new book, Rules of Civility:

Put on some Billie Holiday, pour a dry martini and immerse yourself in the eventful life of Katey Kontent, a smart young woman trying to find herself in Manhattan in the late 1930s. Though Katey's not to the manor born, her wit and intellect open doors all over the city, from Upper East Side society soirees to funky downtown jazz clubs. When she and her friend Eve Ross, a beautiful, nervy party girl from Indiana, meet suave bachelor Tinker Grey, life hits a high note-for a while. (Despite his royal-blue eyes, Tinker is a gentleman with some twists in his pedigree.) Yet his relationship with Katey ultimately shapes both their fates. First-time novelist Towles, a principal in a New York City investment firm and a graduate of both Yale and Stanford, clearly knows the privileged world he's writing about, as well as the vivid, sometimes reckless characters who inhabit it. Reading about Katey and her fast friends shaking off the Great Depression in pre-World War II Manhattan-a city "so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise"-you'll find yourself feeling nostalgic no matter how old you are.


It turns out that Oprah loved the book, too. Click here to read the Oprah.com review.