Books about Socialites from Amazon.com

Cassandra Stover can't believe her luck when she becomes the companion to Mrs. Jameston, a wealthy society woman. Not only can she help her widowed mother and sister, but Cassie genuinely comes to care for the elderly woman who treats her like family. Enter Mark Langford, an insurance investigator, and everything changes for her.

When Mark reveals that he is investigating Sebastian Jameston, the son of Cassandra's employer, she agrees to pretend they are courting so he can stay in close proximity to the family. Motivated by her devotion to Mrs. Jameston and her own suspicion regarding Sebastian, will the game of pretense that Cassie and Mark embark upon allow a tentative love to grow...especially when unexpected danger puts them both at risk?.
Price: $11.19 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The new Blackbird Sisters mystery from the bestselling author of A Crazy Little Thing Called Death.

Down-to-earth debutante Nora Blackbird is having a meltdown-and it isn't because of Philadelphia's heat wave, or an overdose at the city's Chocolate Festival. A noted Philly philanthropist has taken a swan dive from an office balcony-and Nora's friend Lexie stands accused of the murder. Then Nora's scheming parents reappear, sending all three Blackbird sisters into a panic. Now Nora must uncover the scandalous hijinks her parents are plotting-before she winds up taking all the heat and strangling her father with his own ascot..
Price: $7.28 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Born into affluence, Mia Stanley is a winsome socialite with a knack for matchmaking She's also a writer for magazine, much to the disdain of her family--and their society friends. A proper young lady of her social standing isn't meant to labor in such a way, but Mia has always had a way with words… When her writing draws her into the world of downtrodden seamen's wives on Philadelphia's docks, Mia uncovers a scheme that puts her in harm's way. But her heart ends up on the line as well…. Has her determination to always make a match driven away the one man whose esteem she covets?.
Price: $2.77 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $3.26 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Alex Witchel’s first novel, Me Times Three, was praised by Joan Didion as “an irresistible dissection of love in the city.” Now Witchel returns with a sophisticated, witty, sexy story that exposes the world of upper-class New Yorkers and the media that perpetuate their myth.

Ponce Morris is a beautiful, rich widow who’s been dubbed “the spare wife” because she’s the perfect companion to the wealthy, powerful couples she socializes with. She’ll go to sports events with the husbands and throw elegant dinner parties and shop with the wives. She’s cool and nonthreatening because the two things everyone knows for sure are that Ponce doesn’t like sex and doesn’t have a romantic bone in her body. Over the years, she has managed other people’s lives—and her own—perfectly. Ponce has everything under control, exactly the way she likes it.

Until . . . Babette Steele, an ambitious aspiring journalist, finds out that Ponce is having an affair with a socially prominent and very married man and decides to break the scandal in a juicy magazine piece. For Ponce’s circle, day-to-day existence quickly becomes a complicated game of social and professional chicken—whoever outsmarts and outmanipulates the other will win. And there is a lot at stake, not only for Ponce but for her friends, all of whom are in the midst of crises of their own: a philandering novelist who hasn’t been able to write since his breakout Wall Street best seller, an aging billionaire who can’t seem to resist young women (the younger the better), a legendary news show producer on the decline, a big-name political journalist looking to rebound from his wife’s death, and an editor at a glitzy magazine that covers the worlds of politics, fashion, and Hollywood. As Ponce’s life threatens to come apart at the seams, the author takes us into a world she knows intimately: a dynamic Manhattan filled with opinion makers and social fakers.

This is a vibrant, trenchant novel about ambition, love, friendship, and the intoxicating allure of getting ahead . . . and trying to stay there.

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Price: $7.25 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The fabulous life of Brooke Astor, a pioneer of philanthropy and for decades a luminary of New York society.

Hers is a story out of Edith Wharton. After a disastrous early marriage, Brooke Astor wedded the notoriously ill-tempered Vincent Astor, who died in 1959. In a highly publicized courtroom battle, Brooke fought off an attempt to break Vincent's will, which left some $67 million to the Vincent Astor Foundation. As the foundation's president, Brooke would use this legacy to benefit New York, where the Astor fortune had been made.

Brooke would personally visit each grant applicant and charm anyone she met. At her one-hundredth birthday, princes and presidents honored her, but in 2006 a grandson petitioned the courts to have his father removed as Brooke's guardian. Once again an Astor court battle became the stuff of headlines. This biography—based on firsthand knowledge and interviews with Brooke's friends and the heads of New York's great cultural institutions—gives us back the woman so loved and admired, whose hands-on approach would inspire future philanthropists. 16 pages of photographs..
Price: $14.47 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Set in 1950s London, The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets centers around Penelope, the wide- eyed daughter of a legendary beauty, Talitha, who lost her husband to the war. Penelope, with her mother and brother, struggles to maintain their vast and crumbling ancestral home—while postwar London spins toward the next decade’s cultural revolution.

Penelope wants nothing more than to fall in love, and when her new best friend, Charlotte, a free spirit in the young society set, drags Penelope into London with all of its grand parties, she sets in motion great change for them all. Charlotte’s mysterious and attractive brother Harry uses Penelope to make his American ex-girlfriend jealous, with unforeseen consequences, and a dashing, wealthy American movie producer arrives with what might be the key to Penelope’s— and her family’s—future happiness.

Vibrant, witty, and filled with vivid historical detail, The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets is an utterly unique debut novel about a time and place just slipping into history..
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Lauren Weisberger, whose bestselling debut The Devil Wears Prada outed the vicious antics of the magazine industry elite, is back at it with Everyone Worth Knowing, another cautionary tale of sex, power, and fame. This time around, the PR industry is her target, and Prada fans will recognize similar themes throughout this entertaining, if at times overly dramatic, exposé.

Bette Robinson is a twentysomething Emory graduate who shunned her parents' hippie ideals in favor of a high-paying yet excruciatingly boring job at a prestigious investment bank. One day, after a particularly condescending exchange with her boss (who sends her daily inspirational e-mails), Bette walks out on her job in a huff. After a few weeks of sleeping late, watching Dr. Phil and entertaining her dog Millington, Bette's uncle scores her a job at an up-and-coming public relations firm, where her entire job seems to revolve around staying out late partying and providing fodder for clandestine gossip columns. What follows is one episode after another of Bette climbing up the social ladder at the expense of her friends, family, and the one guy who actually seems worth pursuing.

Weisberger is clever enough to turn seemingly outrageous circumstances into amusing anecdotes, like the tale of a woman who was close to suicide until she found out she was only 18 months away from scoring a highly coveted Birkin bag ("You simply cannot kill yourself when you're that close ... it's just not an option."). This wit, combined a hint of voyeurism that most of us can't deny, is what makes Everyone Worth Knowing a guilty pleasure that's well worth the indulgence. --Gisele Toueg

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Frances Burney's first and most enduringly popular novel is a vivid, satirical, and seductive account of the pleasures and dangers of fashionable life in late eighteenth-century London. As she describes her heroine's entry into society, womanhood and, inevitably, love, Burney exposes the vulnerability of female innocence in an image-conscious and often cruel world where social snobbery and sexual aggression are played out in the public arenas of pleasure-gardens, theatre visits, and balls. But Evelina's innocence also makes her a shrewd commentator on the excesses and absurdities of manners and social ambitions--as well as attracting the attention of the eminently eligible Lord Orville.
Evelina, comic and shrewd, is at once a guide to fashionable London, a satirical attack on the new consumerism, an investigation of women's position in the late eighteenth century, and a love story. The new introduction and full notes to this edition help make this richness all the more readily available to a modern reader..
Price: $3.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]