The Sword of Damocles: A Story of New York Life

The title tells the whole story: a young man reaches for everything he wants, never seeing the blade suspended above him. Bertram Mandeville is a gifted pianist who abandons his art for the perilous game of Wall Street, driven by his love for Miss Preston, an heiress whose world is impossibly far above his station. New York in the late 19th century offers brutal winds and even brutal social boundaries, and when a mysterious old woman begins delivering cryptic notes from someone named Paula, Bertram's ambitious climb begins to feel less like success and more like a man walking toward a trap he cannot see. Green, better known for her pioneering detective fiction, wrote this earlier work as a sharp examination of what happens when talent and ambition collide with the ruthless economics of Gilded Age America. The result is a novel that understands how dangerous it is to want what you're not supposed to have, and how easy it is to lose yourself in the reaching.