The Swans of Fifth Avenue

From the author of The Aviator's Wife comes a novel about Truman Capote's scandalous friendship with Babe Paley and New York's society "swans" of the 1950s.

Centred on Capote and Paley, the book moves through the perfumed atmosphere of Manhattan high society: the lunches, the confidences, the gossip, and the fierce intimacy between a writer and the beautiful women who let him in. Real-life figures fill the cast, among them Slim Keith, C.Z. Guest, Gloria Guinness and Pamela Churchill.

Melanie Benjamin traces Capote's self-destructive turn against the very people he called friends, and the story he eventually published that thinly disguised — and exposed — the private lives he had been trusted with. A Goodreads Choice Award nominee for historical fiction in 2016.