Pineapple Street

A deliciously funny, sharply observed novel of family, wealth, love and tennis, this zeitgeisty debut follows three women in an old Brooklyn Heights clan: one who was born with money, one who married into it, and one, the millennial conscience of the family, who wants to give it all away.

Darley, the eldest daughter in the Stockton family, has never worried about money. The product of generational wealth and capitalist success, Darley renounced her inheritance when she married Malcolm, a first generation Korean American with a lucrative job in banking. Sasha, Darley's new sister-in-law, has come from more humble origins, and her hesitancy about signing a pre-nup has everyone worried about her intentions. Georgiana, newly graduated from Brown and proud to think of herself as a "do-gooder," has enough money from her trust that she's able to work for a pittance at a not-for-profit, where she has started a secret love affair with a senior colleague. But when a scandal derails Malcolm's career, leaving Darley financially in the lurch, when Sasha glimpses the less-than-attractive attributes beneath the Stockton brood's carefully-guarded façade, and when Georgiana discovers her boyfriend is married and still in love with his wife, they must all come to terms with what money can't buy-the bonds of love that can make and unmake a family.

Rife with the indulgent pleasures of affluent WASPS in New York and full of recognizable if fallible characters (and a couple of appalling ones!), it's about the peculiar unknowability of someone else's family, about the haves and have-nots and the nuances in between, and the insanity of first love-Pineapple Street is a scintillating, wryly comic novel of race, class, wealth and privilege in an age that disdains all of it.