A Gorgeous Excitement

Arriving January 21, 2025

Inspired by a tragically true New York story from the summer of 1986, A Gorgeous Excitement follows Nina Jacobs in her last months in the city before starting college in the fall. Nina is as bright as she is insecure, as clever as she is vulnerable, and as guarded as she is lonely, making her particularly susceptible to the lure of Upper East Side “It Boy” Gardner Reed’s charms. Nina targets him to take her virginity (she’s the last of her private all-girls school friends so afflicted) and with it, she imagines, her feelings of shame—about her tragically depressed and volatile mother at home, about being Jewish in a world of blue-eyed blond privilege, and for desperately wanting acceptance.

When she’s introduced to cocaine by a ballsy, water-gun-wielding girl she meets in the park, Nina finds her courage and plunges headfirst into her pursuit of Gardner, despite the red flags. As a new medication seemingly frees her mother from darkness, and Nina and Gardner grow closer, it seems that Nina might finally get what she wants. But at what cost?

A Gorgeous Excitement brings to life the shiny glamour and gritty menace of 1980s New York City, from the old-world elegance of the Carlyle Hotel to the seediest of Times Square sex shops, from the Palladium’s glittering club scene to the dingy confines of Penn Station, from the unbridled joy of a sunny afternoon in Central Park to the gruesome street-slashing of a young model’s face, as background to a summer of infinite possibility gone wrong, and as tribute to the countless young women whose voices have been silenced through violence or indifference.

More Advance Praise

A Gorgeous Excitement is the rarest blend of charm and suspense, at once delightful and terrifying, an expertly written non-coming of age that also serves as cautionary tale, as quintessentially haunting as New York City itself. Read it on a bench in Central Park, but only before night falls.”

—Elisa Albert, After Birth and Human Blues

“I haven’t felt this kind of excitement reading a story set in the ’80s since I first discovered Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, and Bret Easton Ellis. From the breathtaking prose to the thrilling glimpse of NYC circa 1986, Cynthia Weiner’s outstanding debut invites us into the introspective yet colorful and reckless world of 18-year-old Nina Jacobs as she navigates insecurity, obsession, and perilous social dynamics. A vivid snapshot of a bygone era and evocative coming-of-age story, A Gorgeous Excitement lives up to its title.”

—Margarita Montimore, national bestselling author of Oona Out of Order

“A coming-of-age story with a ripped-from-the-headlines plot, A Gorgeous Excitement plunges us into 1980s New York City in all its seedy glory. Cynthia Weiner’s novel is a pitch-perfect evocation of a bygone era. I read this brilliant debut with my heart in my throat.”

—Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year 

A Gorgeous Excitement is at turns both gorgeous and exciting. Cynthia Weiner offers a delicious response to Bright Lights, Big City, capturing vividly what it was like for a young woman in the louchely glamourous, cocaine-fueled, privileged white Manhattan of the 1980s.”

—Susan Jane Gilman, Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress and The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street 

A Gorgeous Excitement is a propulsive read filled with vivid characters and a uniquely hilarious, if impossibly sad, mother-daughter dynamic. But the real star of the book for me is the finely drawn world of pre-Giuliani New York, seedy Times Square and all, whose rampant misogyny and racism still feel brutally relevant.”

—Holly Brickley, author of the forthcoming Deep Cuts