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Each month, the Elliott Bay Book Club reads and discusses the best in contemporary fiction with the occasional classic thrown in for good measure. Considered by contemporary critics to be Anthony Trollope's greatest novel, The Way We Live Now is a satire of the literary world of nineteenth-century London and a bold indictment of the new power of speculative finance in English life. The story concerns Augustus Melmotte, a French swindler and scoundrel, and his daughter, to whom Felix Carbury, adored son of the authoress Lady Carbury, is induced to propose marriage for the sake of securing a fortune. Trollope's portrait of Lady Carbury, impetuous, unprincipled, and unswervingly devoted to her own self-promotion, is one of his finest satirical achievements. In his kaleidoscopic depiction of a society on the verge of moral bankruptcy. Trollope gives us life as it was lived more than a hundred years ago, while speaking eloquently to some of the governing obsessions of our own age. Victoria Glendinning said of the novel, "The Way We Live Now is the essence of Trollope. If he had written no other novel, it would have ensured his immortality."
