Bottle Train - by Kyle Lucia Wu (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A contemporary retelling of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth with the high-octane energy of Bright Lights, Big City about a fashion model striving to secure her place within an elite society

In 2010 New York City, runway model and former it girl Lila Gao is trying to cash in on her beauty before time and money run out. Her father's sudden death has sent her reeling, and her once-enviable career has stalled. As one of the few biracial Asian American fashion models, Lila's made a living off her unique appearance since the age of sixteen, but this kind of currency won't last forever.

In order to make rent, Lila needs to stage a comeback, so she reemerges onto the VIP nightlife scene where her magnetic old flame works as a club promoter. Together they get entangled with a wealthy social climber who's determined to insert herself into their exclusive circle, no matter the cost. As New York Fashion Week approaches, Lila lands the opportunity to walk in a major designer's show, while reluctantly entertaining prospective suitors as her backup plan. But when a lavish night spirals out of control, Lila is reminded that her coveted world can't exist without someone's downfall.

With the darkly glamorous, cutthroat world of high fashion and downtown nightlife transposed onto the grand scale of a new American Gilded Age, Bottle Train is an opulent cracked mirror held up to New York's postrecession years of decadence, excess, and inequality.

Review Quotes

"The fizz of champagne, thrum of bass, a thousand darting strobes--such is the underworld of Bottle Train's 2010 Manhattan. Kyle Lucia Wu brings incisive commentary to the myth of the American dream with equal parts ecstasy and cautionary horror; this lurid page-turner captures the charismatic blaze of Gatsby without missing a beat on the coldblooded fetishization of femininity in New York's post-recession club scene. Every word is fluorescent; afterward, you can't unhear the buzz. Kyle Lucia Wu is a prodigious star; Bottle Train, a revelation of our time, of any time. You'll burn through this novel."
--T Kira Māhealani Madden, author of Whidbey and Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

"Bottle Train is part love letter to New York City nightlife, part sharp social commentary, like Edith Wharton meets Best of Everything. In glittering prose, Kyle Lucia Wu perfectly captures the way an uproarious night out feels, lifting the velvet rope to revealthe opulence and the carnage required to achieve it. Come for the party, stay for the poignant interrogation of the ways we splinter ourselves for survival."
--Katie Yee, author of Maggie: or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

"Like a champagne sparkler flaring to life in a dark room, Bottle Train is utterly captivating and intensely seductive from beginning to end. Kyle Lucia Wu gives us the VIP access of our nightmares, exposing a bygone world of New York City's most exclusive nightclubs and the promoters, models, and moguls clawing for capital inside them. In their acts of desperation, we see it all: the weight of family legacy, the fragility of power, and the corrupting allure of wealth and beauty. I relished every moment in the pulsing labyrinth of Bottle Train."
--Jenny Xie, author of Holding Pattern

About the Author

Kyle Lucia Wu is the author of Win Me Something, an Indie Next Pick and an NPR Best Book of the Year. She has received the Asian American Writers' Workshop Margins Fellowship and residencies from Millay Arts, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Kyle is an assistant professor of creative writing at the New School. She lives in New York.