Download The Dollhouse: A Novel AudioBook Free
"The Dollhouse... That's whatever we boys prefer to call it.... The Barbizon Hotel for Women, filled to the rafters with lovely little dolls. Like everyone else." Fiona Davis' stunning debut book pulls listeners in to the lush world of NY City's gorgeous Barbizon Hotel for Women, where in the 1950s a technology of aspiring models, secretaries, and editors resided hand and hand while wanting to claw their way to fairy-tale success, and where a present-day journalist becomes consumed with uncovering a dark magic formula buried deep within the Barbizon's glitzy history. When she finds the famous Barbizon Hotel in 1952, secretarial institution enrollment at hand, Darby McLaughlin is everything her modeling organization hall mates aren't: basic, self-conscious, homesick, and absolutely convinced she doesn't belong - a notion the models do nothing to disabuse. Yet when Darby befriends Esme, a Barbizon maid, she's presented to an entirely new area of NEW YORK: seedy downtown jazz night clubs where the music is as addictive as the heroin that's used there, the startling sounds of bebop, and even the opportunity of romance. Over half of a hundred years later, the Barbizon's eliminated condo, and the majority of its long-ago friends are overlooked. But gossips of Darby's participation in a fatal skirmish with a hotel maid back 1952 haunt the halls of the building as surely as the melancholy music that floats from older people woman's rent-controlled apartment. It's a mixture too intoxicating for journalist Rose Lewin, Darby's upstairs neighbor, to resist - not forgetting the perfect distraction from her own imploding personal life. Yet as Rose's obsession deepens, the ethics of her exploration become progressively more murky, and neither female will stay unchanged when the surprising simple truth is finally revealed.
