Charlotte's Favorite Bookstore

Which is worse? The lies we tell each other, or the lies we tell ourselves? When Stephen Rayfield, a young, gay professor arrives for dinner one evening at the home of his wealthy aunt and uncle, he begins a journey through the social, sexual and political tensions of Charlotte, North Carolina. As he wades into the choppy waters of Charlotte society, Stephen becomes entangled with his Aunt Missy, a vigorous social climber whose wealth and ambition can never afford quite enough distance from her humble beginnings; Laura Caldwell, Missy's best friend, a woman of good intentions and repressive spirituality; Alice Owens, a physician reluctantly transplanted from San Francisco to Charlotte with her banker husband; and Ben Caldwell, Laura Caldwell's sexually confused eighteen-year-old son. Uptown is a story of pretense and betrayal, a portrait of a New South city whose greatest aspiration is simply to be noticed. Part Edith Wharton and part Sex and the City, it is a reflection on the ways the past will always inform the present, for better or worse, and the fatal tension between what appears on the surface and the reality underneath.