“No one gets off the moral hook in this propulsive, brilliantly observed study.”—People (Book of the Week)
“A steady, intelligent probing of family ties and sibling rivalry and themes that illuminate how we live now.”—Newsday
“In this moving study of how the housing bubble’s burst sets a small town’s citizens against each other, Jonathan Dee tells a must-read story for our age. Class struggle, tyranny, America’s disillusionment after 9/11 — The Locals creates a delicately drawn world impossible to forget.”—Mary Karr, New York Times bestselling author of The Liars’ Club
Praise for The Privileges:
“Jonathan Dee is a modern American Master.”—Joseph O’Neill
“Transfixing… composed in Dee’s typically elegant style — gorgeous winding sentences.”—Los Angeles Times
“Full of elegance, vitality and complexity.”—New York Times Book Review
“Scintillating.”—Washington Post
“Admirably relentless.”—New Yorker
“A deliciously sophisticated engine of literary darkness.”—Jonathan Franzen
“Pitch perfect prose.”—Chicago Tribune
“Dee moves from scene to scene like a cinematographer, capturing the essence of a character in a telling glimpse.”—Financial Times
“Dee’s luminous prose never falters; he’s a master.”—Entertainment Weekly
“A deliciously sophisticated engine of literary darkness.“—The Guardian
“The novel goes down like a perfectly chilled glass of champagne — crisp, sparkling and delicious.”—Bookforum
“The Privileges is verbally brilliant, intellectually astute, and intricately knowing. It is also very funny and a great, great pleasure to read. Jonathan Dee is a wonderful writer.”—Richard Ford
“Here is an incredibly readable, intelligent, incisive portrait of a particular kind of American family. Jonathan Dee takes us inside the world of what desire for wealth can do, and cannot do, for the self, the soul, and the family. The Privileges is told with admirable conciseness and yet with great breadth, and the reader is swept along, watching the complications of such desire unfold.”—Elizabeth Strout
“Jonathan Dee is at once an acerbic social critic, an elegant stylist, and a shrewd observer of the human comedy.”—Tom Perrotta
“The Privileges is a pitch-perfect evocation of a particular stratum of New York society as well as a moving meditation on family and romantic love.” —Jay McInerney