Rules of Civility

It was the last night of 1937.

With no better plans or prospects, my roommate Eve had dragged me back to The Hotspot, a wishfully named nightclub in Greenwich Village that was four feet underground.

From a look around the club, you couldn t tell that it was New Year s Eve. There were no hats or streamers; no paper trumpets. At the back of the club, looming over a small empty dance floor, a jazz quartet was playing loved-me-and-left-me standards without a vocalist. The saxophonist, a mournful giant with skin as black as motor oil, had apparently lost his way in the labyrinth of one of his long, lonely solos. While the bass player, a coffee-and-cream mulatto with a small deferential mustache, was being careful not to hurry him. Boom, boom, boom, he went, at half the pace of a heartbeat.

The spare clientele were almost as downbeat as the band. No one was in their finery. There were a few couples here and there, but no romance. Anyone in love or money was around the corner at Café Society dancing to swing. In another twenty years all the world would be sitting in basement clubs like this one, listening to antisocial soloists explore their inner malaise; but on the last night of 1937, if you were watching a quartet it was because you couldn t afford to see the whole ensemble, or because you had no good reason to ring in the new year.

We found it all very comforting.

We didn t really understand what we were listening to, but we could tell that it had its advantages. It wasn t going to raise our hopes or spoil them. It had a semblance of rhythm and a surfeit of sincerity; it was just enough of an excuse to get us out of our room and we treated it accordingly, both of us wearing comfortable flats and a simple black dress. Though under her little number, I noted that Eve was wearing the best of her stolen lingerie.

Eve Ross . . .

Eve was one of those surprising beauties from the American Midwest.

In New York it becomes so easy to assume that the city

Amor Towles is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Rules of Civility, A Gentleman in Moscow, and The Lincoln Highway. The three novels have collectively sold millions of copies and have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. Towles lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children.

Praise for Rules of Civility:

An irresistible and astonishingly assured debut about working class-women and world-weary WASPs in 1930s New York in the crisp, noirish prose of the era, Towles portrays complex relationships in a city that is at once melting pot and elitist enclave and a thoroughly modern heroine who fearlessly claims her place in it. O, the Oprah Magazine

With this snappy period piece, Towles resurrects the cinematic black-and-white Manhattan of the golden age [his] characters are youthful Americans in tricky times, trying to create authentic lives. The New York Times Book Review

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. Wall Street Journal

Put on some Billie Holiday, pour a dry martini and immerse yourself in the eventful life of Katey Kontent [Towles] clearly knows the privileged world he s writing about, as well as the vivid, sometimes reckless characters who inhabit it. People

[A] wonderful debut novel Towles [plays] with some of the great themes of love and class, luck and fated encounters that animated Wharton s novels. The Chicago Tribune

Glittering filled with snappy dialogue, sharp observations and an array of terrifically drawn characters Towles writes with grace and verve about the mores and manners of a society on the cusp of radical change. NPR.org

  Glamorous Gotham in one to relish a book that enchants on first reading and only improves on the second. The Philadelphia Inquirer