"A heart-wrenching, beautiful, darkly comic, deeply necessary tale that stuns again and again with razor-sharp prose and glittering wit. Robert Goolrick is, without question, one of the greatest storytellers of our time." -Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger's Wife In the spellbinding new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Robert Goolrick, 1980s Manhattan shimmers like the mirage it was, as money, power, and invincibility seduce a group of young Wall Street turks. Together they reach the pinnacle, achieving the kind of wealth that grants them access to anything--and anyone. Until, one by one, they fall. Goolrick's literary chops are on full display, painting an authentic portrait of a hedonistic era, tense and stylish, perfectly mixing adrenaline and melancholy. Stunning in its acute observations about great wealth and its absence, and deeply moving in its depiction of the ways in which these men learn to cope with both extremes, it's a true tour de force. "An addictive slice of semiautobiographical fiction . . . Goolrick vividly plumbs the depths of fortune and regret. The result is a compulsively readable examination of the highs and lows of life in the big city." -Publishers Weekly "A compelling, wholly seductive narrative voice . . . Goolrick's stellar prose infuses this redemption story with a good deal of depth and despair, making it read like the literary version of The Wolf of Wall Street." -Booklist "A dark, intoxicating morality tale . . . With his impeccable prose, Goolrick focuses his unflinching eye on the grittiness beneath the sleek facade of nightclubs, fashion, and monied Manhattan extravagance. Beautifully crafted, seductive, and provocative." -Garth Stein, author of A Sudden Light and The Art of Racing in the Rain #1 New York Times bestselling author Robert Goolrick brings to vivid life New York City in the 1980s, a world of excess, as Rooney looks back on a Wall Street career that began with great success and ended with a precipitous crash. It's the story of how he and a group of other young turks made it to the top in the financial world and then fell. In addition to his most recent novel, The Fall of Princes, Robert Goolrick is the author of three other books: The End of the World as We Know It, a memoir; his first novel, A Reliable Wife, with sales of more than 1 million copies; and his second novel, Heading Out to Wonderful. He lives in Virginia. CHAPTER SIX One Reason I Don't Go to the Beach Anymore More than a decade ago, a lifetime ago, really, I rented a lovely summer house by the sea. Not exactly by the sea, but close enough, and it had a big pool and five bedrooms and a sunroom and an English box garden and you could see the ocean from a widow's walk on the roof. It was owned by these two interior decorators so everything was just so and it was all kind of perfectly done in an English-­country-­house kind of way and filled with light and shadow. It was everything my apartment in town wasn't and it was just swell. It was like being in an episode of Masterpiece Theater. All you needed was an under housemaid arranging flowers in cut glass vases. This was just as the great tailgate party was coming to an end, and I had an almost infinite amount of money. Or so it seemed. I worked on The Street, and while I didn't particularly enjoy helping rich people shift money around every minute of every day so that they could get even richer at the expense of people who had no money and never would-I was wracked with guilt at the same time I was insane with adren­aline and raging testosterone-the money was fan­tastic and the roll, the flow of it, was like mainlining every day. The roll smelled like money. You could feel the poison boiling through your veins. Money was the big news, the lifeblood of the decade, and I was in it up to my elbows. I worked in a big room that was basicall