79 Park Avenue

The Edge of Innocence

Step into the glittering yet shadowed world of New York’s Park Avenue in the Roaring Twenties, where youthful ambition collides with moral compromise. In 79 Park Avenue, Harold Robbins weaves an electrifying tale of Paula Vernoff, a striking beauty born to privilege yet driven by restless yearning. When tragedy shatters her family’s respectability, Paula’s path veers from gilded drawing rooms to the neon glow of Manhattan’s underbelly. Robbins’s richly textured prose captures every detail—from the crisp pleats of her tailored flapper dresses to the jagged edges of the city’s speakeasy smoke—inviting readers to experience the intoxicating pulse of an era where dreams were as fleeting as jazz riffs and fortunes rose and fell on a single roll of the dice.

Beneath the City Lights

As Paula reinvents herself, she discovers the power and peril of a life lived on the razor’s edge. Navigating secret rendezvous in penthouse suites and clandestine assignations in candlelit alcoves, she forms alliances with charismatic bootleggers, disillusioned aristocrats, and sympathetic strangers whose loyalty is as unpredictable as the stock market’s ticker tape. Robbins masterfully interlaces subplots of betrayal and devotion, exploring how ambition can become both a redemptive force and a dagger poised at the heart. Every whispered conversation, every hush of silk against marble floors, resonates with the tension of a society teetering between opulence and decay.

Redemption’s Price

When Paula’s carefully constructed world begins to crumble under the weight of past secrets and present dangers, she must confront the choices that define her legacy. From the rooftop terraces overlooking candlelit Central Park to the subterranean labyrinths of Midtown’s illicit trade, her struggle becomes a testament to resilience, sacrifice, and the enduring quest for identity. Robbins’s epic narrative crescendos in a breathtaking finale where passion is tested, loyalties are shattered, and the true cost of reinvention is revealed in a moment as dramatic as the city itself.

. Harold Robbins – bestselling American novelist (1916–1997), whose bold storytelling and vivid characters redefined modern popular fiction, capturing the sex, scandal, and ambition of 20th-century America.