Join us as we welcome New York Times Bestselling author Amor Towles as a guest in our summer event series "Booked for Lunch." Mr. Towles' debut novel, Rules of Civility, was one of our bestsellers in 2011 and we are pleased to welcome him for the paperpack release.
Rules of Civility tells the tale of an uncompromising twenty-five-year-old, Katey Kontent. Katey embarks on a journey to elevate herself from the Wall Street secretarial pool through the upper classes in New York as she searches for a brighter future.
Mr. Towles will join us for a luncheon on Friday, August 24th at Stafford's Perry Hotel from noon to 2:00 p.m. This is a ticketed event and reservations are required. Tickets are $25.00 and are available online by clicking here or by calling 231-347-1180.
Praise for Rules of Civility:
"Manhattan in the late 1930s is the setting
for this saga of a bright, attractive and ambitious young woman whose
relationships with her insecure roommate and the privileged Adonis they
meet in a jazz club are never the same after an auto accident.
Towles'
buzzed-about first novel is an affectionate return to the post–Jazz Age
years, and the literary style that grew out of it (though seasoned with
expletives). Brooklyn girl Katey Kontent and her boardinghouse mate,
Midwestern beauty Eve Ross, are expert flirts who become an instant,
inseparable threesome with mysterious young banker Tinker Grey. With
him, they hit all the hot nightspots and consume much alcohol. After a
milk truck mauls his roadster with the women in it, permanently scarring
Eve, the guilt-ridden Tinker devotes himself to her, though he and she
both know he has stronger feelings for Katey. Strong-willed Katey works
her way up the career ladder, from secretarial job on Wall Street to
publisher’s assistant at Condé Nast, forging friendships with society
types and not allowing social niceties to stand in her way. Eve and
Tinker grow apart, and then Kate, belatedly seeing Tinker for what he
is, sadly gives up on him. Named after George Washington's book of moral
and social codes, this novel documents with breezy intelligence and
impeccable reserve the machinations of wealth and power at an historical
moment that in some ways seems not so different from the current one.
Tinker, echoing Gatsby, is permanently adrift. The novel is a bit light
on plot, relying perhaps too much on description. But the characters are
beautifully drawn, the dialogue is sharp and Towles avoids the period
nostalgia and sentimentality to which a lesser writer might succumb.
An elegant, pithy performance by a first-time novelist who couldn’t seem more familiar with his characters or territory."
