A Time to Be Born

Amanda Keeler has clawed her way out of the backwaters of Ohio and into the affections of Julien Evans, New York's newspaper magnate. With his ex-wife vanquished, she reigns over their Fifth Avenue mansion, throwing martini-soaked parties and climbing the bestseller list with her wildly successful (ghostwritten) novels.To those back home, Amanda has it all. Behind the glittering façade, however, she's grown restless - denied the human right to flirt by her pathologically jealous husband. When a timid school friend arrives in the city, Amanda seizes the perfect alibi, landing little Vicky a job and leasing her a studio which she plans to use in secret for trysts with old flame, Ken. But desire rarely follows orders. Vicky falls fatally for Ken, and soon the three are flung off course into a volatile love triangle that threatens to topple Amanda's carefully constructed empire. Bitingly funny and irresistibly glamorous, A Time to Be Born is a timeless portrait of self-invention, set in a 1940s Manhattan rife with backstabbing charm, brittle friendships and ambitious women with nothing to lose, least of all a heart.



Dawn Powell (1896-1965) was an American novelist and playwright known for her incisive satires of New York's cultural and literary circles. Born in Mount Gilead, Ohio, she endured a tumultuous childhood before running away at thirteen to live with an aunt who later supported her studies at Lake Erie College. After graduating, Powell moved to New York City, immersing herself in the bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village as a "permanent visitor" to the metropolis. She gained early recognition for her witty, often risqué pieces in The New Yorker and Esquire, and 1939 became a Scribner author, sharing legendary editor Maxwell Perkins with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Although Powell enjoyed a devoted circle of admirers, her work drifted into obscurity after her death. Interest in her novels was revived decades later through Gore Vidal's appraisal in The New York Review of Books, as well as championing from Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Tim Page, who as executor of her estate has worked tirelessly to keep Powell in print.