In commercial terms, it lives up to the hype. He wrote the novel in a year and then spent three years revising it: 'The book was designed with 26 chapters because there are 52 weeks in the year and I allotted myself two weeks to draft, revise and bank each chapter.' His strategy paid off: the book was the subject of a six-figure bidding war. Yale‑educated, Towles is an investment manager who lives in New York.

I loved too that the author's name makes him sound like something out of The Great Gatsby himself. It's all too rare to find a fun, glamorous, semi-literary tale to get lost in. This is a flesh-and-blood tale you believe in, with fabulous period detail. If there's a problem, it's this: the parallels with Breakfast at Tiffany's are perhaps a little too overt (glamorous but down-at-heel girl falls in love with wealthy but mysterious benefactor). But Amor Towles's novel is a different endeavour and puts its own retro stamp on self-discovery in Manhattan. Touted as 'Mad Men: The Novel', Jaffe's book is about the life of office girls in a 1950s publishing house. I worried initially that the reissue of Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything had slightly stolen Rules of Civility's thunder. As the shock denouement nears, what she doesn't know is that someone else entirely is pulling all of their strings. But the memory of Tinker is always in the background and Katey is constantly steeling herself for the next nugget she'll hear on the grapevine about him and Eve. Meanwhile, Katey's life canters forward through parties and unlikely introductions until she lands a truly Carrie Bradshaw-style role at a hot new magazine, Gotham. Katey knows the truth: Tinker loves her and is only tending to Eve because he feels guilty. Eve is disfigured but spots an opportunity for justice: Tinker is wealthy and seems to have a lot of time on his hands so she sets him the task of wooing her better, eventually on the French Riviera. Katey's best friend Eve Ross – a Samantha among women – bows out of the narrative early on when Tinker crashes his car with the two of them in it. We know there are going to be cocktails, flirting and a lot of kicking up of high heels: 'We started the evening with a plan of stretching three dollars as far as it would go.' Except that he definitely hasn't read the last rule: 'Labour to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.'Īnyway it's New Year's Eve 1937 and Katey Kontent is heading to a Greenwich Village hotspot – quite literally the Hotspot – with her room-mate Eve. Tinker is enigmatic, adorable and lives his life according to George Washington's Rules of Civility. She is immediately transported back three decades to the night she first met him – on the eve of the most memorable year of her life. In the opening chapter it's 1966 and Katey's at an exhibition looking at a picture of the man who changed everything for her: Tinker Grey.

Reviews for rules of civility