Rules of Civility

New York City, 1938. Katey Kontent, a sharp-witted young secretary from a working-class background, celebrates New Year’s Eve with her roommate Eve Ross in a Greenwich Village jazz bar. Their chance meeting with wealthy banker Tinker Grey draws all three into an intense friendship, but an accident changes their prospects and sends them along different paths. Katey begins moving beyond the secretarial pool into the restaurants, apartments and private clubs of Manhattan’s elite, relying on intelligence and self-command rather than money or family connections.

Over the course of a single decisive year, Katey encounters ambition, romance, betrayal and the carefully maintained appearances of high society. Her progress through Depression-era New York reveals how class can be performed, inherited or concealed, while the choices made by Tinker and Eve test the limits of loyalty between them. Framed by Katey’s later recollection of 1938, the novel examines reinvention and the lasting consequences of encounters that initially appear accidental.