East of Eden

In 1930s New York, Eva Litchfield is a writer of undeniable genius and glacial elusiveness, whose marriage to Nicholas Van Suydam places her at the heart of a patrician family whose traditions she was never meant to inherit. Narrated by Dinah Avery, recently returned from France and hungry for the literary gossip of the city, the novel unfolds through conversations and encounters that slowly reveal the fractures beneath Eva's troubled marriage. Her formidable mother-in-law watches with the steely patience of a woman who has built empires of expectation, and the reader is drawn into a world where every dinner party is a battlefield and every whispered aside carries the weight of reputation. This is a novel about what it costs a woman to be both extraordinary and married, both an artist and a social ornament. Glenn writes with sharp precision about the rivalries, anxieties, and secret dissatisfactions of New York's literary elite, painting a portrait of a world that celebrates creativity in theory but demands conformity in practice.