"I can't remember the last time I couldn't put a book down. I read Dear Money in cars, in waiting rooms, even at a rest stop on the turnpike. I read whole passages out loud to my husband. Martha McPhee is a wickedly good social observer, a writer of beautiful, lyrical prose, and a consummate storyteller. This is a very smart novel that unpacks small surprises and pleasures on every single page."

"Martha McPhee's fourth novel wouldn't be so funny if it didn't ring so true...McPhee has a lot of fun with a couple of archetypes--a Pygmalion transformation of the novelist into a financial high roller and a 'city mouse/country mouse' exchange of ambitions--but what makes this novel work so well is that India continues to engage the reader's empathy, even affection, as she forsakes literary high-mindedness for filthy lucre."

"Although no one can profess to comprehend the complexities of the current economic quagmire, McPhee dishes its jargon with all the aplomb of someone who TiVos CNBC. Delivering virulent social satire with a velvet, humanitarian touch, McPhee's timely send-up deftly parodies the fallout from misplaced priorities."

McPhee plays with the notion of 'keeping up with the Joneses' in an entertaining and ironic way.

"Wouldn't be so funny if it didn't ring so true...India continues to engage the reader's empathy, even affection, as she forsakes literary high-mindedness for filthy lucre."

"Martha McPhee writes with verve and uncanny insight about those recent, heady dreams of easy wealth. This New York Pygmalian story takes us beyond what we thought we knew about money and art and all their precarious alliances, in an adventure that recreates the city's temptations, both material and idealistic. Dear Money is conceived with such cutting precision and grace, it will make readers think of a contemporary Edith Wharton, but there's a dark mischief here too, shades of Andy Warhol. Full of beautiful, unflinching sentences, this is an uncompromising, brave, brilliant story."

Martha McPhee is the author of four previous novels and a finalist for the National Book Award. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker and Zoetrope. A few years ago, when a legendary bond trader claimed he could transform her into a booming Wall Street success, she toyed with the notion but wrote Dear Moneyinstead. She lives in New York City with her children and husband, the poet and writer Mark Svenvold.

Kate Reading is an Audie Award-winning narrator and has received dozens of Earphones Awards. She has been named by AudioFile magazine as a Voice of the Century, as well as the Best Voice in Science Fiction & Fantasy in 2008 and 2009 and Best Voice in Biography & Culture in 2010. She is also a theater actor in the Washington, DC, area and has been a member of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company since 1987. Her work onstage has been recognized by the Helen Hayes Awards Society, among others.

One

THE STORY begins, of course, with real estate. The heady days of 2003. Maine. Pond Point, the old Victorian cottage tied together, it seemed, with twine, standing as it does before the dunes with a swath of sea grass like a moat, sweet pea shoots, their blue flowers dancing in a late-afternoon breeze blowing offshore. The beach. Miles of sand, flanked by rivers, one large, one small, spilling into the Atlantic. Little islands floating just offshore, connected at low tide by sandbars that reach to them like arms.
 Those wonderful July days, as Emma Chapman declared with that fierce enthusiasm of hers that spoke of a desire to appreciate every chance life gives to her. July—each day’s weather a mystery, a surprise. Storms blow in from nowhere to entertain the day. From an immaculate sky, fog settles down thick as cotton while sandpipers and plovers dart about. Thunderheads in the afternoon, towering cumulus, then a crack of thunder. Heart-shattering sunsets. Or simply the stillness of early morning in high season, a scorcher in the offing, but for now, an hour past dawn, towels and bathing suits still damp on the clothesline, the sun rising over the river, heating the woods, bringing the strong smell of pine sap into the kitchen where coffee brewed. On the porch, Emma, squarely facing the ocean in a golden bar of sunlight, seemed to have everything in life, and the only thing more she wanted, it seemed to me, was to own this—the salt air and gratifying geometries of the sea, all that came with this house.
 I did not like the house at first. The wind blew right through the walls, and chipmunks and mice had made it (even our beds) their home. It was wet and cold. The screen door banged with an alarming thud. The neighbor’s house was occupied by a family of Bostonians—you could tell this by the big B for the Boston Red Sox that appeared everywhere: on their hats, their barbecue aprons, the kites their children sent upward to broadcast their allegiance to the heavens. They greeted us and smiled stiffly in a way that seemed to register a conviction that there would be no further need to continue down the path of fellow feeling.
 The Bostonians’ cottage was a bit too close. They weeded their flower beds and assiduously mowed a “lawn” that was mostly sand. They prosecuted a passion for golf by purchasing tiny plastic golf sets for their boys, who whacked little golf-ball-sized Wiffle balls across the lot, and when an errant ball landed on the side of the Chapmans’ rundown summer rental, the Bostonian boys sat sullenly staring across the lot at our girls, unable to ask for help. Our girls seemed to enjoy their discomfort, but took pity on them, tossing the balls back, which the boys accepted without thanks, and moved their game farther away. “By their fruits you shall know them,” my husband, Theodor, noted. “Yeah,” I said. But I admired, actually came to envy, Emma’s passion for the house, despite the frosty neighbors, and wanted to see it with her eyes since it gave her so much pleasure. The views took in the open Atlantic, sailboats leaning into the breeze, cormorants and seagulls and, on occasion, even seals, their dog-like heads bobbing in the surf.
 Emma and Will had been renting the house for six years, driving up from New York for the month with their two daughters, Will commuting back and forth. Emma had found the house. Strolling the beach, she had asked various sunbathers camped beneath umbrellas if they rented their homes, the cottages in the dunes behind them. The elderly couple she eventually found did not rent, but they were charmed by her determination: Oh, that’s your house? That one there? The red one with the turret? It’s right out of a Hopper painting. No, no, a Wyeth. It’s pure Wyeth. It’s from the 1880s? Oh, how I’d love to spend a week there, absorbing all that history.
 The couple took her up to the house, showed her around. Every window framed a spectacular view. She could see through the mess of all the guests, the children of nieces and nephews with names like Sacagawea—I kid you not—overrunning the place. The couple had no children of their own. “A view from every window,” Emma said. She was exuberant. It was the quality I loved best about her. Emma complimented the children (diapered, juice-stained, sticky fingers). “Sacagawea, what an original name,” she said. And she complimented the vintage piano and the antique windowpanes, the fraying curtains. In the turret bedroom she complimented the old photographs hanging crookedly on the wall. “Why, they’re Bachrach,” she said, examining the signature of one of the prints and noticed they were all signed by him. She flashed her smile on Mrs. Hov (“Chekhov without the chek,” Mrs. Hov would say). “Yes, they are,” Mrs. Hov confirmed, and her milky blue eyes brightened. “I grew up in Connecticut,” she said, as if in explanation and to underscore her more prominent past, her voice soft and self-assured. An elegant woman still, with slender fingers that had long ago mastered the piano, today she wore a simple housedress, but yesterday she was the smiling girl in all the sepia-tinted prints.
 Mr. Hov was a retired Swift scholar and an amateur poet of the A. E. Housman mold, with a firm yet charming manner. The couple was at the house when Theodor and I arrived with our two girls for a long weekend. The Hovs had come to fix the boiler and were just leaving. I would remember them for a long time, a pair, he a smaller version of her with the same kind blue eyes, hazy with cataracts. Though she had a full head of lovely white hair and he was bald. He was in the middle of reciting a poem he’d written, his voice earnest and mellifluous: “I try the fleeting years to catch. / But, mark thee well, this one firm adage of the sea!” Emma and Will listened; she leaned into his caress, standing on the porch overlooking the dunes and ocean. She wore a smile that, having begun in sincerity, hadn’t quite anticipated how long a poem could actually go on, and was striving mightily, along with the poem, to prop herself up.
 Upon our arrival, Theodor and I found them in a state of suspension, the elderly man holding forth. “For whom our time has come, / And man is laid beneath the sand, the sod, or sea.” It was an ode to Pond Point. Hov’s wife had been coming here since the 1930s. Together they bought the house in the 1950s, for a song, with the equity they’d accrued in their primary home. Standing there on the porch of their second home, windblown and kissed by the Maine light, Mrs. Hov, her lips curled, just slightly, with love, watched her husband’s gentle hands conduct his words. “The sharpened sands their lips do pulse and / Tongueless, whisper songs most sure. / ’Tis we, not thee, that shall endure, / that shall endure!”
 A moment of silence followed and then Emma burst into applause. “Just a little something I wrote in 1983,” Mr. Hov said, turning his attention fully to us, my girls’ eyes wide with curiosity at the spectacle. “Ah, your guests have arrived,” he said. “We’ve heard all about you, Emma and Will’s friends. All good, I can assure you! Welcome, renowned New Yorkers! I invite you all to have a wonderful weekend.”
 We knew all about Emma’s cast of friends. She was always telling stories about her collection of elaborate people—friends marrying in the final stages of fatal cancer; a wife whose slender book of poems about her adulterous love affair with a young buck became a bestseller, publicly shaming her (also adulterous) husband with both her betrayal and her success; a young bride who prided herself on her Gypsy ancestors, using her lineage to land her a spot on the reality television show My Wedding Day. The Hovs were somehow part of that mix, Emma’s menagerie.
 Within a few sentences Mr. Hov spilled forth what Emma had told them of us, all of it hyperbolic and with exclamations. Like the Hovs, we were characters in the theater of her life, and it did feel that, if you stuck around long enough, some intriguing plot would unfold for you. Mr. Hov was well into the details of local history, the Sagadahoc settlement: “They came in 1607, same as Jamestown, though the settlers did not fare so well.” His expression seemed to appreciate the drama of that antique failure. He directed our attention to the piping plovers nesting in the dune grass—his way of saying to be careful as we walked through it to the beach, not to upset the plovers, as they are rare and protected. “Now, no more of us,” he said cheerily. “We are out of your hair.” He turned to his wife: “Eunice, I am in the car.” He enunciated each word with care. Then he left, Eunice trailing slowly, happily behind.
 “Don’t you just love them?” Emma said, greeting us, kissing us—the flourish of arrival, folding us immediately into her arms. “I’m so glad you got to meet them, because, you know, I’m going to have to kill them.” Emma spoke with mischief. “A pity, because they are nice, aren’t they?” Then she listed all the other people she’d have to murder in order to buy the place: the ne’er-do-well young niece, her husband, her children and little Sacagawea too. The way Emma talked, you almost believed she would kill. And the way she smiled, lips crimping ever so slightly, like someone who wants to steal a gorgeous piece of fruit from a store’s sidewalk display, you almost believed she’d get away with it.
 “I love it. I love it. I love it,” Emma said, an elegant woman with fine, bird-like bones. She took us on a tour of the house, up and down the stairs, showing us where we would bathe, eat, read, sleep. “In the turret,&rdqu...