The Party Upstairs

An electrifying debut novel that unfolds in the course of a single day inside one genteel New York City apartment building, as tensions between the building's super and his grown-up daughter spark a crisis that will, by day's end, have changed everything.Ruby has a strange relationship to privilege, having grown up the super's daughter in the basement of an Upper West Side co-op that is full-on gentrified, and getting more so with each passing year. She wasn't by any measure privileged herself, but her close childhood friendship with the daughter of wealthy tenants named Caroline, and the mere fact of living in a lovely neighborhood, close to her beloved Natural History Museum and just across the park from the Met, brought with them certain real advantages, even expectations. Naturally Ruby followed her dreams and took out large student loans to attend a prestigious small liberal arts college and explore her interest in art. But now, out of school for a while, she is no...