Searching for Grace Kelly

Three young women meet while living at the Barbizon Hotel in 1955 New York, one trying to make it in the publishing field, another who dreams of singing at the Stork Club and the third who is battling personal demons. Reading-group guide online. Original. 20,000 first printing.

"Thanks to Callahan's flawless evocation of the place and time, you understand how high the stakes are for these women, who have to break every rule their mothers taught them to discover who they really are." —More "Perfect for your next girls' night." —Good Housekeeping "Callahan, who has convincingly researched the era. . .writes page-turning prose and gets the characters' big arcs right." —ELLE "You'll rip through this novel, inspired by Grace Kelly's pre-princess Barbizon stay." —Marie Claire "Callahan's debut is a delight."—People Magazine “Michael Callahan weaves together the lives of three young women who discover Beat New York City while dorming at the famed Barbizon Hotel—sorority of sorts that brought up some of the city's most storied starlets-to-be and housed the cultural hub that was Stork Club—in a novel we won't be putting down.” —Harper’s Bazaar “Pour yourself a highball and settle in: Searching is a fun, frothy romp through time.” —*Manhattan Magazine* “The New York of the 1950s shines through Callahan’s pages. His characters’ breathless excitement with their new lives pulls you into that time and place, and his deft plotting holds you there.”  —*New York Times Book Review* "[A] deliciously stylish, retro first novel. . .As each woman becomes entangled with mysterious, even dangerous men, Callahan suavely combines literary finesse and pulp fiction to create a fast-moving, heartwrenching tale of romance and tragedy in a time of tyrannically sexist social conventions." —Booklist "Callahan’s debut novel truly captures glamorous New York City from young women’s perspective in the 1950s. For aficionados of anything from the Fifties and the movie The Best of Everything (1959)." —Library Journal “Callahan has a knack for nailing the perfect detail to take a reader back to a particular time and place; this story of three spirited young women is full of the glamour of New York City's Barbizon Hotel in 1955. The dialogue sings, and the pacing was perfect. It's a gem of a story.” —Laura Moriarty, New York Times bestselling author of The Chaperone “A wonderful champagne bubble of a book—glamorous, aspirational, and relatable! The fifties never seemed so fun! Wicked, naughty and clever.” —Melissa de la Cruz, New York Times bestselling author of Witches of East End “This tale of big dreams, drop-dead glamour and fragile hearts will have you turning pages late into the night. Michael Callahan tells the timeless story of three very different young women on the cusp of discovering themselves, inventively set at that midcentury moment in New York City when what it meant to be a woman began to change in ways great and small.  Suspenseful, sharp and romantic, I loved every minute of it.” —Piper Kerman, bestselling author of Orange is the New Black "Reading Searching for Grace Kelly is like watching your favorite old Hollywood movie, filled with colorful characters, funny moments, tender scenes and plenty of intrigue. I was completely charmed by this book!" &mdash

Auteur

Michael Callahan is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Searching for Grace Kelly and The Night She Won Miss America, as well as a coffee-table history of the famed Musso & Frank Grill restaurant in Hollywood. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair, his work has been published in Esquire, Town & Country, and the New York Times, among others. He lives in Los Angeles.

Texte du rabat

"A gem of a story" (Laura Moriarty) about the famed Barbizon Hotel in which three spirited young women form an unlikely friendship and come of age in 1955 New York. For a small-town girl with big-city dreams, there is no address more glamorous than New York's Barbizon Hotel. Laura, a patrician beauty from Smith, arrives to work at Mademoiselle for the summer. Her hopelessly romantic roommate, Dolly, comes from a working-class upstate town to attend secretarial school. And then there's Vivian, a brash British bombshell with a disregard for the hotel's rules. Together, the girls embark on a journey of discovery that will take them from the penthouse apartments of Park Avenue to the Beat scene of Greenwich Village to Atlantic City's Steel Pier--and into the arms of very different men who will alter their lives forever.

Échantillon de lecture
**Prologue
*December 1955

Good enough, she thinks, puckering one more time into a piece of tissue. She leans away a little from the dressing table, makes a final appraisal. Maybe a touchup with some light powder. She snaps the compact shut, stands, and steps back from the mirror. One last long view: tailored wool suit (fifteen dollars at Oppenheim Collins on West Thirty-Fourth Street), a single strand of pearls, gloves, and her hat. Since she was old enough to understand fashion, she has abided by one credo and one credo only, and that is from Edna Woolman Chase, the editor of *Vogue: “Fashion can be bought. Style one must possess.”
   She slips her arms into her coat. She will not be outside long, but still, she will be outside. She takes a deep breath.
  * I’m ready.
*   Should she bring her bag? Yes, it will have her identification inside. She slides it onto her crooked forearm, then downs the final gulp of whiskey from the crystal tumbler on her dressing table, feels it barrel down her throat, warm and bitter. A small smile escapes as she glances at the suitcase and hatbox beside the door. Both are empty. Thank God, neither of the girls had the chance to pick them up before they’d left. She’d have been found out. And then what would she have done?
   She steps out into the hallway. Quiet. It is Friday, the last before Christmas. Most of the girls have left already. The lucky ones are sipping champagne, on dates at the Stork or the Harwyn, others already on trains or buses back home for the holidays, bags packed and brimming with lies about their fizzy days in the big city. Those left behind are scattered about the building, “the Women,” as they are known but never called, each locked on the other side of her door, her only company tepid tea and crossword puzzles.
   She passes the elevator bank. If she steps into the elevator, there will most certainly be questions from the operator, one always desperate for a story. Instead, she exits the door at the end of the hall that leads to the stairwell, beginning a slow, steady ascent up the steps.
   It is fifteen minutes before she pushes the door out, feels the whoosh of crisp night air rush at her. She is winded from walking up so many flights in heels, but the biting chill feels good seizing her lungs. She steps onto the veranda, looks out onto New York—on beautiful, wonderful, dizzying New York, teeming with life, each tiny lit window a tale: of someone, of something, of heartbreak and triumph and joy and agony and stupidity and sorrow and sex and laughter and bet…