East Side Story

A Novel

By: Louis Auchincloss

Narrated by: Clinton Wade, Gregory St. John

"Louis Auchincloss has an enveloping story to tell and a perfect, understated knowledge of those who inhabit it," said the New York Times of The Scarlet Letters. The same can be said of Auchincloss' new novel, a tour de force that charts the rise of one uncommon family in America's grand city.

How did the families who live on Manhattan's Upper East Side get to where they are today? As much a penetrating social history as it is engaging fiction, East Side Story tells of the Carnochans, a family whose Scottish forebears establish themselves in New York's textile business during the Civil War. From there they quickly move on to seize prominent positions in the country's top schools and Manhattan's elite firms. As the novel unfolds, family members across the generations recount their stories, illuminating lives steeped in both good fortune and moral jeopardy. From women who outsmart their foolish husbands, to ambitious lawyers who protect the Carnochan name, to the family's artists and writers, all weigh the question that infuses so much of Auchincloss's fiction: What makes for a meaningful life in a family that has so much?

In its starred review, Kirkus Reviews hails Auchincloss for being "once again the master of his craft". East Side Story is both a loving and wicked look at New York's own as only this sublime master of manners can provide.

©2004 Louis Auchincloss (P)2014 Audible, Inc.

For richer or poorer, it's always about the money

This book is a series of character studies about a New York upper-crust family that take place in the 19th and 20th centuries. They're all very different from each other, although perhaps not really unusual in the society in which they move. Marriage is as much a financial as a personal matter to these people, almost all of whom are wealthy by any normal standard. Friendships are often based as much on usefulness in professional and social success, and family ties are a network of advantage as well as affection. They all share the universal problem of divining what they value most and how to go about getting it. It's odd, but the very well-to-do and those in poverty seem to worry about money in equal measure. The characters, both central and peripheral, are well-drawn and curiously unique, and the narrator captures each one without resorting to overemphasis. Thoroughly enjoyable.