Inside The Pages: Karen Dukess

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Book synopsis:

In the summer of 1987, 25-year-old Eve Rosen is an aspiring writer languishing in a low-level assistant job, unable to shake the shadow of growing up with her brilliant brother, Danny. With her professional ambitions floundering, Eve jumps at the chance to attend an early summer gathering at the Cape Cod home of famed New Yorker writer Henry Grey and his poet wife, Tillie. Dazzled by the guests and her burgeoning crush on the hosts’ artistic son, Eve lands a new job as Henry Grey’s research assistant and an invitation to Henry and Tillie’s exclusive end-of-summer “Book Party”—where attendees dress as literary characters. But by the night of the party, Eve discovers uncomfortable truths about her summer entanglements and understands that the literary world she so desperately wanted to be a part of is not at all what it seems.

A page-turning, coming-of-age story written with a lyrical sense of place and a profound appreciation for the sustaining power of books, THE LAST BOOK PARTY shows what happens when youth and experience collide and what it takes to find your own voice.

About the author:

With a background in newspaper and magazine journalism, Karen Dukess spent the last eight years as a speechwriter on gender equality at the United Nations Development Programme. She is a graduate of Brown University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and lives in Pelham, New York. This is her first novel.

Dukess danced around writing fiction for decades. Now fifty-six, she was an editorial secretary at Little, Brown and an assistant at a literary agency in the 1980s, a time when manuscripts still came in “over the transom” in cardboard boxes and assistants took dictation for typewritten letters that were sent in the mail. She became a newspaper reporter, and then a speechwriter at the United Nations. Finally, she accepted the idea that writing fiction is not so much magic as it is hard work, and hunkered down and wrote her debut novel, THE LAST BOOK PARTY [Henry Holt and Company; July 9, 2019; $27.00; Hardcover].