Dutton
July 2017
On Sale: July 11, 2017
Featuring: Darby McLaughlin; Rose Lewin
368 pages ISBN: 1101985011 EAN: 9781101985014 Trade Size Add to Wish List
Fiona Davis’s stunning debut novel pulls readers into the
lush world of New York City’s glamorous Barbizon Hotel for
Women, where a generation of aspiring models, secretaries,
and editors lived side-by-side while attempting to claw
their way to fairy-tale success in the 1950s, and where a
present-day journalist becomes consumed with uncovering a
dark secret buried deep within the Barbizon’s glitzy past.
When she arrives at the famed Barbizon Hotel in 1952,
secretarial school enrollment in hand, Darby McLaughlin is
everything her modeling agency hall mates aren’t: plain,
self-conscious, homesick, and utterly convinced she
doesn’t belong—a notion the models do nothing to disabuse.
Yet when Darby befriends Esme, a Barbizon maid, she’s
introduced to an entirely new side of New York City: seedy
downtown jazz clubs where the music is as addictive as the
heroin that’s used there, the startling sounds of bebop,
and even the possibility of romance.
Over half a century later, the Barbizon’s gone condo and
most of its long-ago guests are forgotten. But rumors of
Darby’s involvement in a deadly skirmish with a hotel maid
back in 1952 haunt the halls of the building as surely as
the melancholy music that floats from the elderly woman’s
rent-controlled apartment. It’s a combination too
intoxicating for journalist Rose Lewin, Darby’s upstairs
neighbor, to resist—not to mention the perfect distraction
from her own imploding personal life. Yet as Rose’s
obsession deepens, the ethics of her investigation become
increasingly murky, and neither woman will remain
unchanged when the shocking truth is finally revealed.
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