Carnegie Hill, Jonathan Vatner
Carnegie Hill, Jonathan Vatner
List: $32.99 | Sale: $23.10
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Carnegie Hill
A Novel

Author: Jonathan Vatner

Narrator: Cassandra Campbell

Unabridged: 15 hr 31 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/20/2019


Synopsis

"While creating unique and believable voices, [narrator Cassandra Campbell] transforms these mostly privileged characters into people we deeply care about. She mines the sympathetic qualities underneath their city-hardened shells and helps listeners sense their vulnerabilities." — AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award winner

Deception is just another day in the lives of the elite.

At age thirty-three, Penelope “Pepper” Bradford has no career, no passion and no children. Her intrusive parents still treat her like a child. Moving into the Chelmsford Arms with her fiancé Rick, an up-and-coming financier, and joining the co-op board give her some control over her life—until her parents take a gut dislike to Rick and urge Pepper to call off the wedding. When, the week before the wedding, she glimpses a trail of desperate text messages from Rick’s obsessed female client, Pepper realizes that her parents might be right.

She looks to her older neighbors in the building to help decide whether to stay with Rick, not realizing that their marriages are in crisis, too. Birdie and George’s bond frays after George is forced into retirement at sixty-two. And Francis alienates Carol, his wife of fifty years, and everyone else he knows, after being diagnosed with an inoperable heart condition. To her surprise, Pepper’s best model for love may be a clandestine romance between Caleb and Sergei, a porter and a doorman.

Jonathan Vatner's Carnegie Hill is a belated-coming-of-age novel about sustaining a marriage—and knowing when to walk away. It chronicles the lives of wealthy New Yorkers and the staff who serve them, as they suffer together and rebound, struggle to free themselves from family entanglements, deceive each other out of love and weakness, and fumble their way to honesty.

Praise for Carnegie Hill:

"A shrewd confection of a novel, fun to read and warm at heart—full of neighborly sideswiping, unfeedable appetites, and an overview that sees the pride and fragility of it all." – Joan Silber, 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award winner and the PEN/Faulkner Award winner for Improvement

"The Chelmsford Arms, the apartment building at the center of Jonathan Vatner’s debut novel, is a bubble within a bubble, a Galapagos of the rich, full of beautifully bizarre mutations that exist nowhere else. A shrewd comic tale of old lovers, young lovers, and the blanket of privilege that both warms and binds them all. A marvelous book.” – Jonathan Dee, Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Privileges

About Jonathan Vatner

JONATHAN VATNER is an award-winning journalist who has written for The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Poets & Writers; and many other publications. He has an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA in cognitive neuroscience from Harvard University. He lives in Yonkers, NY with his husband and cats. Carnegie Hill is his first novel.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Katie on August 05, 2019

This is going to sound weird but for so much of this book the characters felt much more like characters in a fictional book rather than people. I don't need to have anything in common with a character in a book or even necessarily like them, but I do need something that feels real to me. This is the......more

Goodreads review by Laura on June 17, 2019

I went back and forth on this book. There were times I found the plot / characters interesting, and other times when I was so bored. I found most of the characters to be really unlikeable, except for a few gem moments for each. Francis, in particular, was thoroughly obnoxious, and I wanted Carol to......more

Goodreads review by Amy on May 05, 2020

Let me start off by saying that I won this book through a giveaway in exchange for an honest review.... While I did enjoy reading this book and learning about all of the different characters that lived at the Chelmsford Arms, I just kind of felt like it didn’t go anywhere. And the ending....like what......more

Goodreads review by Donna on September 16, 2019

My thanks go to Net Galley and St. Martin’s Press for the review copy. This work of fiction started out like gangbusters and left me feeling confused in the end. What the heck is the author’s purpose here? The premise is that Pepper, the child of hugely wealthy, influential parents, has left home to......more

Goodreads review by Olga on March 02, 2019

When reading a book, a lot of readers, myself included, often take into account how likable a character is when it comes to whether or not they enjoyed the book. The thing about this book is well, none of the characters are likable, and they're all insufferable. Taking into account who Vatner is wri......more