Emma's Table: A Novel [Paperback]

From the moment Emma Sutton walks into the FitzCoopers auction house, the disgraced media darling knows exactly what she wants: an antique dining table. What she gets is a chance to set things right.

Fresh from a yearlong stretch in prison, Emma finds her life just as she left it—filled with glittering business successes, bruising personal defeats, rolling television cameras, and awkward Sunday dinners at home. She needs a clean slate—a second chance that might be provided by two unlikely saviors: Benjamin Blackman, a terminally charming social worker and Emma's part-time assistant, and one of Benjamin's most heartbreaking wards, an overweight little girl from Queens named Gracie.

Delicious&. [A] touchingly bittersweet comedy of modern urban existence&. Anyone who can build nail-biting suspense out of a Sunday dinner gone horribly wrong is deserving of praise.Sophisticated, witty, and fun, Emmas Table had me hooked from the first page, and smiling through the very last. Philip Galanes serves up a pitch-perfect comedy of manners with a deft and elegant touch.Emmas Table is a charming urban fairy tale about characters who actually learn from their mistakes. Philip Galanes has written a sweet, sly comedy of manners with an oddly familiar and slightly notorious figure at its center.This summers delicious read.Emmas Table is a marvel: a whip-smart juggling act, as light as meringue, with a perfectly tender heart.[Galanes has a] gift for telling detail, rueful but compassionate insight and effortless imagery.In other hands, a novel about a fictionalized Martha Stewart would be an occasion for a hatchet job. But Mr. Galanes...has created a heroine not only capable of but also deserving of kindness