4 Blondes

Candace Bushnell, the author behind Sex and the City, turns her attention to four women in this collection of linked-by-theme stories about Manhattan's glamorous and well-connected. Each story follows a different blonde as she navigates love, ambition, disappointment and self-doubt, and Bushnell watches them all with a dry, unsparing eye.

In "Nice N'Easy," a beautiful B-list model spends each summer attaching herself to whichever man owns the biggest house in the Hamptons. Eventually she has to face the fact that a rich partner and a beach house with a view don't add up to happiness. In "Highlights (for Adults)," a successful magazine columnist insists she has no need of a man, yet a look back at her failing marriage shows how far her literary journalist husband fell short of what she wanted, both in bed and out of it.

"Platinum" gives us Princess Cecilia, who has married the world's most eligible bachelor and finds the weight of everyone's expectations crushing. She records her slide into paranoia in her journal. In "Single Process," an aging "It girl" fears she has run out of options among the local bachelors and heads to London to look for a husband, picking up sharp observations about how British and American men differ.

Together the stories take readers into a world of status, money and appearances, with plenty of humor and a frank view of desire among the "It people." Readers who enjoyed Bushnell's earlier work will recognize the same wry voice.