Frederick Olliver and Lyle Gaynor are an unlikely pair. He is an introverted, bookish medievalist who still lives with a flatmate, while she is a glamorous, wildly successful playwright who refuses to leave her marriage because it secures her social standing. Frederick does not belong in Lyle's high-powered world, yet fate has other plans. When Frederick's long-gestating opus is seized by his publisher in a last-ditch attempt to save their struggling business, it unexpectedly becomes a massive success.Suddenly, Frederick finds himself in the spotlight, attracting admirers-including the fiercely determined Dodo, who pursues him with an agenda of her own. As Lyle's Broadway career falters and Frederick becomes the literary darling of the very scene he once dismissed, the two must navigate a reversal of fortunes in a society obsessed with wealth and status, where love often comes at a price.



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.



A huge talent, Dawn Powell. Sentence by sentence, among the greatest writers of her time



The combination of a waspish sense of satire with a human sense of pathos results in a novel that is highly entertaining and curiously touching



The 1948 tale of a scholar's roller-coaster affair with a married society type is an anguished love story, a reversal-of-fortune parable, and a blistering satire that rings true today-cynical columnists, silly socialites, sinister nighthawks, all in one gorgeous Deco package



One of Powell's finest novels and better than anything currently on the bestseller lists



Funny, smart, cool and socially impassioned. Dawn Powell is one of the great U.S. novelists of the 20th-century