Searching for Grace Kelly

This novel of three young workingwomen in 1950s Manhattan is “a delight” (People).

For a small-town girl with big-city dreams, there is no address more glamorous than New York’s Barbizon Hotel. Laura, a patrician beauty from Smith, arrives to work at Mademoiselle for the summer. Her hopelessly romantic roommate, Dolly, comes from a working-class upstate town to attend secretarial school. And Vivian, a brash British bombshell with a disregard for the hotel’s rules, rounds out the trio of friends.

Together, the girls embark on a journey of discovery that will take them from the penthouse apartments of Park Avenue to the Beat scene of Greenwich Village to Atlantic City’s Steel Pier—and into the arms of very different men who will alter their lives forever.

“You’ll rip through this novel, inspired by Grace Kelly’s pre-princess Barbizon stay.” —Marie Claire

“A gem of a story.” —Laura Moriarty, author of The Chaperone

“Pour yourself a highball and settle in . . . a fun, frothy romp through time.” —Manhattan

“[A] deliciously stylish, retro first novel . . . A fast-moving, heartwrenching tale of romance and tragedy in a time of tyrannically sexist social conventions.” —Booklist

“The New York of the 1950s shines through Callahan’s pages. His characters’ breathless excitement with their new lives pulls you into that time and place, and his deft plotting holds you there.” —The New York Times Book Review