Rules of Civility Reading Order

Rules of Civility (2011) by Amor Towles is a debut novel set in New York City in 1938, narrated by Katey Kontent — a twenty-five-year-old typist from a working-class background who, on New Year's Eve, meets a charismatic young man named Tinker Grey in a Greenwich Village jazz bar. What follows is a portrait of a year in which Katey moves through New York's social strata — from Greenwich Village bohemia to the genteel Upper East Side — observing the city's elaborate codes of conduct and the people who navigate or violate them. Towles writes in a voice of polished precision influenced by Henry James and Edith Wharton, and the novel captures both the glamour and the cruelty of a world organized around class, manners, and what it costs to appear to belong.