Novelist Sharon Pomerantz discusses her
inspiration for RICH BOY

978-0-446-56318-5
$24.99 (In Canada: $29.99)
384 pages; 6 x 9
Fiction
Rights: U.S., Canada, and Open Market

Robert Vishniak is the favored son of Oxford Circle, a working-class Jewish neighborhood in 1970s Philadelphia. Handsome, charming and clever, he employs his considerable gifts to move ever higher on his social ladder.

In his decades-spanning journey of self-invention, Robert glides from hardscrabble beginnings into the elite universities of New England. With ever-growing ambition, he ensconces himself among scions of unimagined wealth and influence, building a future that he believes will eclipse his humble past. Ultimately, he finds himself moving among the highest circles of Manhattan society, at the heart of the heady Reagan boom.

But as so often is the case, it takes but a single, fleeting occurrence to change Robert’s life, threatening to undermine his achievements and unravel his carefully constructed identity.

Ten years in the making, Sharon Pomerantz’s RICH BOY is a sweeping novel of class, sexual rebellion, money and love. A tapestry that interweaves the lives of poor and middle class, middle class and supremely wealthy, RICH BOY shows us four decades in an American century through the eyes of one ceaseless dreamer. It’s a book that looks fearlessly at both our desire to remake ourselves, and the price we pay for the privilege.