With her first book, Sex and the City, Candace Bushnell rocketed to international fame, offering vivid, uncensored portrayals of romantic intrigues, liaisons, and betrayals among Manhattan’s elite. In her new book, Four Blondes, she returns to the playgrounds of New York’s powerful and beautiful—and again captures the zeitgeist and mores of our era like no other writer.

Four Blondes tells the stories of four women caught at crossroads in their lives, facing choices and realizations that will redefine them forever. A beautiful B-list model finagles rent-free summerhouses in the Hamptons from her wealthy lovers, until she discovers that she can get a man for the summer but she can’t get what she wants. A high-powered magazine columnist’s floundering marriage to a literary journalist is thrown into crisis when her husband spends a wild night on the town with his movie star friend. A self-styled Cinderella whose royal husband was one of the world’s most eligible bachelors records her descent into paranoia as she attempts to re-create her self and her world. A writer who fears her time for finding a husband is running out travels to London in search of the kind of love and devotion she can’t find in Manhattan—and gets far more than she bargained for.

Studded with Bushnell’s trademark wit and stiletto-heel-sharp insights, Four Blondes is scandalous, gossipy, and compulsively readable. It’s a gimlet-eyed view of the trials of love and fame, money and power, as dry and as bracing as a martini at the Ritz.