Mercury in Retrograde

Author Paula Froelich has had the scoop on almost every high profile New York scandal. Now she brings her insider’s perspective to fiction in a delicious debut that had readers talking all summer.

Mercury in Retrograde introduces three women whose lives intersect when they each decide to move into the same SoHo apartment building. Penelope Mercury is an intrepid reporter at the New York Telegraph who spends her days pounding the pavement in every borough to meet the unreasonable demands of her boss. She aspires to cover courtroom drama for the paper, but on one disastrous day instead of being promoted, she gets fired. Lena “Lipstick Carcrash” Lippencrass is an Upper East Side socialite who works at the high fashion magazine Y and loses her perfect apartment after her wealthy parents cut her off from her trust fund. And Dana Gluck is a corporate lawyer on the verge of becoming a partner who has seen her marriage and prospects for motherhood disappear, leaving her almost comatose with depression.

As these three disparate women become friends, they soon discover that having their carefully planned lives fall to pieces might have been the best thing that could have ever happened to them. A thoroughly modern novel, Mercury in Retrograde captures the trials and tribulations of city life with humor and heart.

Paula Froelich, a well-connected gossip columnist for the New York Post, brings her insider's perspective to this delicious debut about the bonds of friendship among three very different women.

Publishers Weekly

Three down-on-their-luck Manhattan women form an unlikely fellowship in Page Six deputy editor Froelich's formulaic-though sometimes funny-debut. Anxious socialite Lena Lippencrass, smalltown transplant-cum-intrepid reporter Penelope Mercury and high-powered lawyer Dana Gluck end up in the same former SoHo tenement building at low points in their lives: Lena, cut off by her wealthy parents, is slumming it on Sullivan Street; Penelope is out of a job after accidentally damaging her office's property; and Dana lives on Weight Watchers while obsessing over her divorce. But once they band together, they right themselves while helping each other. After an initial barrage of New York names and places (and an abundance of parenthetical asides), the novel eventually finds a breezy groove as it traipses through TV newsrooms, high-stakes partnership meetings and a fashion gala at the Met, leading to comically fitting results-and new love interests-for each. Froelich takes a few light shots at socialite Web sites, politicians in prostitution scandals, fashion magazines and drug-addled young celebrities, and the book's message of rejecting gossip and hierarchy is sweetly unexpected, even if everything else is by the numbers. (June)

The deputy editor for the New York Post's Page Six column, Paula lives in New York City. Mercury in Retrograde is her first novel.