This book presents the surviving parts of the last novel Capote worked on for many years but never completed. It was meant to be a large portrait of the wealthy, fashionable world he knew, told through a narrator who moves among glamorous and scandalous figures. The chapters that exist are sharp, gossipy and darkly comic, and some caused offence when they first appeared in magazines. The book is valued as a glimpse of an ambitious project and of his late, satirical style.