It’s the Roaring Twenties, and Oliver Montcrieff is living the American Dream. He’s one of the wealthy elite, a world where rules are written to be ignored, your place in society is measured by how much your friends envy you, and money can buy happiness. So what if his sister is a shameless flirt, his best friend an incorrigible troublemaker, and the love of his life married to another man? With a pedigree in one hand and a stack of cash in the other, you can do whatever you feel and have whatever you want. Why worry about how long it will last?

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Prologue

We were jaded and it was wonderful.

We drifted through life like the achenes of dead dandelions, afraid to die and afraid that we would live forever.

We were ensnared by our own enchantments. We loved ourselves for all of the things we pretended to be, and we hated ourselves for all of the things that we feared others thought we were.

Days ran together and the nights never ended. We took slow drags from our cigarettes—orange embers drifted lazily to the ground, flickered for a moment, and faded away into the darkness.

When we slept, our dreams blazed so brilliantly that they threatened to incinerate even the myriad of stars that twinkled above our heads.

If you cut us open we would bleed gin and jazz.

We were bright and beautiful, but we could be terribly ugly sometimes.