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Carnegie Hill

A Novel

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

"While creating unique and believable voices, [narrator Cassandra Campbell] transforms these mostly privileged characters into people we deeply care about. She mines the sympathetic qualities underneath their city-hardened shells and helps listeners sense their vulnerabilities." — AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award winner

Deception is just another day in the lives of the elite.
At age thirty-three, Penelope "Pepper" Bradford has no career, no passion and no children. Her intrusive parents still treat her like a child. Moving into the Chelmsford Arms with her fiancé Rick, an up-and-coming financier, and joining the co-op board give her some control over her life—until her parents take a gut dislike to Rick and urge Pepper to call off the wedding. When, the week before the wedding, she glimpses a trail of desperate text messages from Rick's obsessed female client, Pepper realizes that her parents might be right.
She looks to her older neighbors in the building to help decide whether to stay with Rick, not realizing that their marriages are in crisis, too. Birdie and George's bond frays after George is forced into retirement at sixty-two. And Francis alienates Carol, his wife of fifty years, and everyone else he knows, after being diagnosed with an inoperable heart condition. To her surprise, Pepper's best model for love may be a clandestine romance between Caleb and Sergei, a porter and a doorman.
Jonathan Vatner's Carnegie Hill is a belated-coming-of-age novel about sustaining a marriage—and knowing when to walk away. It chronicles the lives of wealthy New Yorkers and the staff who serve them, as they suffer together and rebound, struggle to free themselves from family entanglements, deceive each other out of love and weakness, and fumble their way to honesty.
Praise for Carnegie Hill:
"A shrewd confection of a novel, fun to read and warm at heart—full of neighborly sideswiping, unfeedable appetites, and an overview that sees the pride and fragility of it all." – Joan Silber, 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award winner and the PEN/Faulkner Award winner for Improvement
"The Chelmsford Arms, the apartment building at the center of Jonathan Vatner's debut novel, is a bubble within a bubble, a Galapagos of the rich, full of beautifully bizarre mutations that exist nowhere else. A shrewd comic tale of old lovers, young lovers, and the blanket of privilege that both warms and binds them all. A marvelous book." – Jonathan Dee, Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Privileges

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 17, 2019
      In Vatner’s witty debut, Penelope “Pepper” Bradford is, at 32, something of a late bloomer among Manhattan’s elite. She’s unmarried, works at a series of unsatisfying entry-level jobs, and is embarrassed when her married younger sister becomes pregnant before she does. Things change when she meets Rick Hunter, a young banker, and they become quickly engaged. Rick moves them into the Chelmsford Arms, a co-op apartment building for the old and wealthy in Carnegie Hill, the “epicenter of Upper East Side privilege.” On impulse, Pepper decides to join the co-op board and immediately finds herself at odds with its tyrannical president, Patricia Cooper. On the eve of their wedding, Pepper finds out that Rick might be cheating on her, but she still goes ahead with the ceremony. As she tries to repair her marriage, run for co-op board president, and make friends with several of the building’s tenants (who all have problems of their own), Pepper finally takes her first steps toward becoming a true adult. Vatner’s keen eye for domestic dissatisfaction will remind readers of Laurie Colwin. He populates the Chelmsford Arms with a delightful cast of characters, but best of all is Pepper herself, a charming, contemporary update of an Edith Wharton character. This debut will entertain and satisfy readers.

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Languages

  • English

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