A “novel of power and hypocrisy in upper-class New York” that follows the rise of one prominent family, generation after generation (The New Yorker).
How did the families who live on Manhattan’s Upper East Side get to where they are today? This engaging saga by a New York Times–bestselling author charts the rise of an uncommon family in America’s grandest city.
East Side Story tells of the Carnochan family whose Scottish forebears established themselves in New York’s textile business during the Civil War. From there they quickly moved on to seize prominent positions in the country’s top schools and Manhattan’s elite firms. As the novel unfolds, Carnochans across generations recount stories about their 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 Louis Auchincloss’s fiction: What makes for a meaningful life in a family that has so much?
“Some writers inform, some instruct, and some tell how rewarding good prose can be,” John Kenneth Galbraith once observed. “Louis Auchincloss does all three.” In its starred review, Kirkus Reviews called East Side Story “a rich chronicle . . . that succeeds in humanizing a rare and much-maligned species of Americans for those who don’t come across them very much.” Auchincloss’s superb novel is both a loving and wicked look at New York’s Yankee aristocracy as only this sublime master of manners can provide.
