Product Description

With her tousled blond hair and upturned nose, dark glasses and chic black dresses, Holly Golightly is top notch in style and a sensation wherever she goes. Her brownstone apartment vibrates with martini-soaked parties as she plays hostess to millionaires and gangsters alike. Yet Holly never loses sight of her ultimate goal - to find a real life place like Tiffany's that makes her feel at home. Immortalized in a film starring Audrey Hepburn, Truman Capote's BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S is full of sharp wit and in its exuberant cast of characters vividly captures the restless, slightly madcap era of early 1940s New York.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21610 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

About the Author
Truman Capote was born in New Orleans in 1925. Leaving school at 15 he worked for the New Yorker - his first, and last, regular job. He is the author of many highly praised books, including A TREE OF NIGHT AND OTHER STORIES, THE GRASS HARP, IN COLD BLOOD, MUSIC FOR CHAMELEONS and ANSWERED PRAYERS. Truman Capote died in 1984.

Customer Reviews

Not what I expected
I was pleasantly surprised by this book - I vaguely remember seeing the film with Audrey Hepburn but could remember nothing about it at all. The book, however, made much more of an impression. It's an easy read and is entertaining and atmospheric. My guess is it'll stay with you longer than the film will. I thought it would be sugary sweet, a romantic comedy with a happy ending but the characters and relationships are more flawed and interesting than that. An interesting book. Worth a read.

Marvellous picture from an underrated novelist
This is it! The sarcasm flows through the pages, this is better than the film, there are no happy endings, there is the delight of marvellous prose, of humour, of a star that burnt too brightly, too well and too quickly. If Capote had kept writing like this and hadn't become a TV standby guest for so long he'd be up there with the greats. The brilliant novel by the forgotten star of crystal prose. Buy it, Read it, Love it.

A captivating character study with prose like champagne
Breakfast at Tiffany's takes its cue from Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Both are short, beautifully written New York novels in which semi-invisible narrators wrestle with more self-indulgent characters, who take centre stage - and with whom the narrators enjoy ambiguous, shifting relationships.

In fact, the narrator in Breakfast at Tiffany's is so invisible he doesn't even have a name - apart from those the central character, Holly Golightly, gives him. The novel is a hymn to Holly - the narrator desperately wants to understand her, just as Nick Carraway struggles to understand Gatsby. Ultimately, though, hero and narrator are too different, with the heroes in both novels behaving exactly as heroes do: bolder, more inventive and almost certainly less stable than their narrators. Also like Gatsby, Holly Golightly has a hell of a backstory, slowly revealed.

Capote's prose is not dissimilar to Scott Fitzgerald's: poetic, but perhaps a little simpler and with a lighter touch, including some wry humour. Attractively written, it's difficult not to be as spellbound as the narrator is by Holly - however maddening she is. A captivating character study with prose like champagne - classy, and with fizz.