Ashley Sands

A Terribly Private Club Ashley Sands

You might be wondering how I went from promising Dartmouth art-history graduate to nameless federal inmate in just a few short years. Which vice did me in? Well, greed and ambition are different sides of the same coin. But then again, it's never that simple.

Wide-eyed Kate Sullivan is thrilled when she scores a job as the assistant to the fabulous yet slightly unhinged Brazilian art dealer Rafaela de Souza. Struggling in her new position, fish-out-of-water Kate is on the verge of being fired when she catches the eye of both "it artist" Kodi Best and charming dealer Cole Beaumont. Suddenly her career takes off, and she's swept into the murkier depths of the art market, where she must question how far she's willing to go to make the illustrious career she imagined a reality.

The heroine of A Terribly Private Club is an unforgettable narrator, detailing her journey from small-town Ohio to the glamorous world of multimillion-dollar paintings and New York high society, and then, finally, to her prison cell at the Danbury Federal Correctional Institute.

Sweetbitter meets Anna Delvey in this captivating debut novel about a young woman who'll do whatever it takes to make it in the cutthroat, decadent, and sometimes criminal world of New York City's art scene.