rules of civility by amor towles summary

It’s also…a loving evocation of the chance social alchemy of Village jazz joints, Wall Street coffee shops, Midtown Champagne palaces, and Lower East Side former speakeasies.” “A fizzy, finely observed tale of an ambitious young secretary from Brooklyn who falls in with a crowd of upper-class bright young things in late 1930s Manhattan. “With this snappy period piece, Towles resurrects the cinematic black-and-white Manhattan of the golden age of screwball comedy, gal-pal camaraderie and romantic mischief…Towles characters are youthful Americans in tricky times, trying to create authentic lives.” – The New York Times Book Review Who needs such burdensome comparisons? On the evidence of “Rules of Civility,” being Amor Towles should be plenty good enough.” – Wall Street Journal Towles’s novel have rarely failed to bring up F. “This very good first novel about striving and surviving in Depression-era Manhattan deserves attention…The great strength of Rules of Civility is in the sharp, sure-handed…evocation of Manhattan in the late ‘30s… Advance reviews of Mr. Even as she waits for circumstances to bring Tinker back into her orbit, she will learn how individual choices become the means by which life crystallizes loss.

Befriended in turn by a shy, principled multimillionaire, an Upper East Side ne’er-do-well, and a single-minded widow who is ahead of her times, Katey has the chance to experience first hand the poise secured by wealth and station, but also the aspirations, envy, disloyalty, and desires that reside just below the surface.

This chance encounter and its startling consequences cast Katey off her current course, but end up providing her unexpected access to the rarified offices of Conde Nast and a glittering new social circle. The story opens on New Year’s Eve in a Greenwich Village jazz bar, where Katey and her boardinghouse roommate Eve happen to meet Tinker Grey, a handsome banker with royal blue eyes and a ready smile. Armed with little more than a formidable intellect, a bracing wit, and her own brand of cool nerve, Katey embarks on a journey from a Wall Street secretarial pool through the upper echelons of New York society in search of a brighter future. Set in New York City in 1938, Rules of Civility tells the story of a watershed year in the life of an uncompromising twenty-five-year-old named Katey Kontent.

Rules of civility by amor towles summary