A Gorgeous Excitement

In this ＂absorbing, astute novel＂ (Town & Country, Must Read Books of Winter 2025) one young woman’s summer of infinite possibility takes a turn she never saw coming.

＂I haven’t felt this kind of excitement reading a story set in the ’80s since I first discovered Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, and Bret Easton Ellis.＂--Margarita Montimore, bestselling author of Oona Out of Order

There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother’s depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Both are seemingly impossible--when her mother isn’t lying in bed for days, she’s lashing out at Nina over any perceived slight. And after a blowjob gone spectacularly wrong, Nina is the talk of Flanagan’s, the Upper East Side bar where young Manhattan society congregates. It doesn’t help that she’s Jewish, an outsider among the blue-eyed blondes who populate this rarified world. She can fit in, kind of, with enough alcohol and prescription drugs stolen from her parents’ medicine cabinet.

Flanagan’s is where she pines for the handsome, preppy, and charismatic Gardner Reed. Every girl wants to sleep with him and every guy wants to be him. After she’s introduced to cocaine, Nina plunges headlong into her pursuit of Gardner, oblivious to the warning signs. When a new medication seemingly frees her mother from darkness, and Nina and Gardner grow closer, it seems like Nina might finally get what she wants. But at what cost?

Freud called cocaine ＂a gorgeous excitement,＂ but a gorgeous excitement for the wrong guy can be lethal.

Cynthia Weiner has a long career writing and teaching fiction. Her short stories have been published in Ploughshares, The Sun, and Epiphany, and one of her stories, ＂Boyfriends,＂ was awarded a Pushcart Prize. She is also the assistant director of The Writers Studio in New York City. A Gorgeous Excitement, her first novel, was inspired by her upbringing on New York’s Upper East Side in the 1980s, and particularly by the notorious ＂Preppy Murder＂ of 1986. Weiner now lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.