Artie Kipps has spent his life in the margins: orphaned, raised by a draper and his wife in a small town, destined for a life measuring cloth and making change. Then a newspaper ad upends everything. He's the grandson of a wealthy man and heir to a fortune. Suddenly the boy who couldn't afford school is drowning in drawing rooms, desperately trying to learn which fork to use and how to speak without his native accent. Wells, drawing on his own difficult climb from shopkeeper's son to celebrated writer, watches with sharp, sad humor as Kipps loses himself trying to become someone else. The old life, the simple pleasures, the girl who loved him before he was worth loving, begins to feel like a dream. By the novel's end, when Kipps finally understands what he's traded, the path back may be closed forever. This is comedy of manners with a quiet tragedy underneath, a social satire that is also a tender portrait of one man's attempt to escape the station he was born into, and the self he was born with.
