Sex and Vanity
Jake cited this "champagne cocktail in book form" as a favorite in WSIRN Episode 277: Books that feel like a vacation for your brain. When I read it last year, I didn't realize it was a retelling of A Room with a View until I thought "hmm, the name Lucy Church seems familiar," and started picking up more connections. But you do not need to be familiar with E.M. Forster's classic to enjoy this glittery, glamorous, and gossipy novel that opens on an island holiday in Capri—and then jumps forward seven years later to a decadent summer vacation in East Hampton.
The author of the New York Times bestselling phenomenon Crazy Rich Asians takes you from Capri to NYC, where Lucie Tang Churchill finds herself torn between two men–and two very different cultures.
On her very first morning on the jewel-like island of Capri, Lucie Churchill sets eyes on George Zao and she instantly can’t stand him. She can’t stand it when he gallantly offers to trade hotel rooms with her so that she can have a view of the Tyrrhenian Sea, she can’t stand that he knows more about Casa Malaparte than she does, and she really can’t stand it when he kisses her in the darkness of the ancient ruins of a Roman villa and they are caught by her snobbish, disapproving cousin Charlotte.
The daughter of an American-born Chinese mother and a blue-blooded New York father, Lucie has always sublimated the Asian side of herself in favor of the white side, and she adamantly denies having feelings for George. But several years later, when George unexpectedly appears in East Hampton, where Lucie is weekending with her new fiancé, Lucie finds herself drawn to George again. Soon, Lucie is spinning a web of deceit that involves her family, her fiancé, the co-op board of her Fifth Avenue apartment building, and, ultimately, herself as she tries mightily to deny George entry into her world–and her heart. Moving between summer playgrounds of privilege, peppered with decadent food and extravagant fashion, Sex and Vanity is a truly modern love story, a daring homage to A Room with a View, and a brilliantly funny comedy of manners set between two cultures.