Product Description

Meet Tali, Schuyler, and Kim. Best friends since college, each twenty-something (okay, almost thirty) has seen her share of career foils and romantic foibles in the world's greatest city, New York. Having been friends for more than a decade, they know that they all need a change. On Valentine's Day, they are each alone for one reason or another. At dinner together, the trio makes a pact. Within one year, each woman will change the thing that most challenges her.

For Tali, good Tali, whose boyfriend of five years just left her for a personal trainer, it will be to find romance -- or a fling -- in every foreign country she visits (and given her job as a secret shopper for high-end resorts, she goes to a lot of foreign countries). For Schuyler, a book editor, her goal is to get on the other side of the typewriter and write her own book -- much to the dismay of her boyfriend, who is a Very Public Figure. And for commitment-phobic, Daddy's little rich-girl, Kim (she can't hold a job, or a boyfriend, unless he's married and therefore erratic and unattainable) , her goal is to have an engagement ring and a house in Scarsdale.

Each woman starts the first day of the year of reckoning with the best of intentions -- which is exactly why the pact goes immediately, and exceptionally, awry.

Filled with the delicious insider details (of a celebrity-level (or celebrity-wannabe) lifestyle), Chasing Harry Winston brings listeners once again into the heart of an elite world, where friendships will be tested to the point of breaking.

Let the games begin.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #182755 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-27
• Released on: 2008-05-27
• Formats: Abridged, Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 5
• Binding: Audio CD

About the Author
Lauren Weisberger is the author of The Devil Wears Prada, which spent more than a year on the New York Times hardcover and paperback bestseller lists. The film version, starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, won a Golden Globe Award and grossed over $300 million worldwide. Her second novel, Everyone Worth Knowing, was also a New York Times bestseller. She lives in New York City with her husband.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Panties is a Vile Word

When Leigh's doorbell rang unexpectedly at nine on a Monday night, she did not think, Gee, I wonder who that could be. She thought, Shit. Go away. Were there people who actually welcomed unannounced visitors when they just stopped by to "say hello" or "check in"? Recluses, probably. Or those friendly Midwestern folks she'd seen depicted in Big Love but had never actually met -- yes, they probably didn't mind. But this! This was an affront. Monday nights were sacred and completely offlimits to the rest of the world, a time of No Human Contact when Leigh could veg out in sweats and watch episode after beautiful TiVo'd episode of Project Runway. It was her only time alone all week, and after some intensive training on her part, her friends, her family, and her boyfriend, Russell, finally abided by it.

The girls had stopped asking for Monday-night plans at the end of the nineties; Russell, who in the beginning of their relationship had openly balked, now quietly contained his resentment (and in football season relished having his own Monday nights free); her mother struggled through one night a week without picking up the phone to call, finally accepting after all these years that she wouldn't hear from Leigh until Tuesday morning no matter how many times she hit Redial. Even Leigh's publisher knew better than to assign her Mondaynight reading...or, god forbid, knew not to log an interrupting phone call. Which is precisely why it was so incredible that her doorbell had just rung -- incredible and panic-inducing.

Figuring it was her super, there to change the air-conditioning filter; or one of the delivery guys from Hot Enchiladas, leaving a menu; or, most likely of all, someone just confusing her door with one of her neighbors', she hit Mute on the TV remote and did not move a muscle. She cocked her head to the side like a Labrador, straining for any confirmation that the intruder had left, but the only thing she heard was the dull, constant thudding from above. Suffering from what her old shrink called "noise sensitivity" and everyone else described as "fucking neurotic," Leigh had, of course, thoroughly scoped out her upstairs neighbor before signing over her life savings: The apartment might have been the most perfect she'd seen in a year and a half of looking, but she hadn't wanted to take any chances.

Leigh had asked Adriana for the scoop on the woman above her, in apartment 17D, but her friend had just pursed her pouty lips and shrugged. No matter that Adriana had lived in the building's full-floor penthouse apartment from the day her parents had moved from São Paulo to New York nearly two decades before; she had completely embraced the New Yorker's I-Promise-Not-to-Acknowledge-You-If-You- Extend-Me-the-Same-Courtesy attitude toward her neighbors and could offer Leigh no info on her neighbor. And so, on a blustery December Saturday right before Christmas, Leigh had slipped the building's doorman twenty bucks, Bond-style, and waited in the lobby, pretending to read a manuscript. After Leigh spent three hours scanning the same anecdote, the doorman coughed loudly and looked at her over the top of his glasses with meaning. Glancing up, Leigh felt an immediate wave of relief. Before her, removing a QVC catalog from an unlocked mailbox, stood an overweight woman in a polka-dot housedress. Not a day younger than eighty, thought Leigh, and she breathed a sigh of relief; there would be no stilettos clacking against the hardwood floors, no late-night parties, no parade of visitors stomping around.

The very next day Leigh wrote a check for the down payment, and two months later she excitedly moved into her mint-condition onebedroom dream apartment. It had a renovated kitchen, an oversized bathtub, and a more than decent northern view of the Empire State Building. It might have been one of the smallest units in the building -- okay, the smallest -- but it was still a dream, a beautiful, lucky dream in a building Leigh never thought she could afford, each and every obscenely priced square foot paid for with her own hard work and savings.

How could she possibly have predicted that the seemingly innocuous upstairs neighbor was a dedicated wearer of massive wooden orthopedic clogs? Still, Leigh berated herself regularly for thinking high heels were the only potential noise risk: it had been an amateur's mistake. Before she'd spotted her neighbor wearing the offending shoes, Leigh had created an elaborate explanation for the relentless upstairs racket. She decided that the woman had to be Dutch (since everyone knew Dutch people wore clogs), and the matriarch of a huge, proudly Dutch family who received constant visits from countless children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, siblings, cousins, and general advice-seekers...all, most likely, Dutch clog-wearers. After spotting her neighbor wearing an air cast and feigning interest in the woman's disgusting-sounding foot ailments including (but not limited to) plantar fasciitis, ingrown toenails, neuromas, and bunions, Leigh had clucked as sympathetically as she could manage and then raced upstairs to check her copy of the co-op rules. Sure enough, they dictated that owners were required to cover eighty percent of their hardwood floors with carpet -- which she realized was an entirely moot point when the very next page revealed that her upstairs neighbor was president of the board.

Leigh had already endured nearly four months of round-the-clock clogging, something that might have been funny if it was happening to someone else. Her nerves were directly tied to the volume and frequency of the steady thump-thump-thump that segued into a thumpety-thump- thumpety-thump-thump pattern when Leigh's heart began to pound right along with it. She tried to breathe slowly, but her exhales were short and raspy, punctuated by little guppy gasps. As she examined her pale complexion (which on good days she thought of as "ethereal" and all other times accepted as "sickly") in the mirrored hallway closet door, a thin sheen of perspiration dampened her forehead.

It seemed to be happening more frequently, this sweating/breathing issue -- and not just when she heard the wood-on-wood banging. Sometimes Leigh would awaken from a sleep so deep it almost hurt, only to find her heart racing and her sheets drenched. Last week in the middle of an otherwise completely relaxing shavasna -- albeit one where the instructor felt compelled to play an a capella version of "Amazing Grace" over the speakers -- a sharp pain shot through Leigh's chest on each measured inhale. And just this morning as she watched the human tidal wave of commuters cram onto the N train -- she forced herself to take the subway, but hated every second of it -- Leigh's throat constricted and her pulse inexplicably quickened. There seemed to be only two plausible explanations, and although she could be a bit of a hypochondriac, even Leigh didn't think she was a likely candidate for a coronary: It was a panic attack, plain and simple.

In an ineffective attempt to dispel the panic, Leigh pressed her fingertips into her temples and stretched her neck from side to side, neither of which did a damn thing. It felt like her lungs could reach only ten percent capacity, and just as she considered who would find her body -- and when -- she heard a choked sobbing and yet another ring of her doorbell.

She tiptoed over to the door and looked through the peephole but saw only empty hallway. This was exactly how people ended up robbed and raped in New York City -- getting duped by some criminal mastermind into opening their doors. I'm not falling for this, she thought as she stealthily dialed her doorman. Never mind that her building's security rivaled the UN's, or that in eight years of city living she didn't personally know anyone who'd been so much as pickpocketed, or that the chances of a psychopathic murderer choosing her apartment from more than two hundred other units in her building was unlikely....This was how it all started.

The doorman answered after four eternally long rings.

"Gerard, it's Leigh Eisner in 16D. There's someone outside my door. I think they're trying to break in. Can you come up here right away? Should I call 911?" The words came out in a frantic jumble as Leigh paced the small foyer and popped Nicorette squares into her mouth directly from the foil wrapper.

"Miss Eisner, of course I'll send someone up immediately, but perhaps you're mistaking Miss Solomon for someone else? She arrived a few minutes ago and proceeded directly to your apartment...which is permissible for someone on your permanent clearance list."

"Emmy's here?" Leigh asked. She forgot all about her imminent death by disease or homicide and pulled open her door to find Emmy rocking back and forth on the hallway floor, knees pulled tight against her chest, cheeks slick with tears.

"Miss, may I be of further assistance? Shall I still -- "

"Thanks for your help, Gerard. We're fine now," Leigh said, snapping shut her cell phone and shoving it into the kangaroo pocket of her sweatshirt. She dropped to her knees without thinking and wrapped her arms around Emmy.

"Honey, what's wrong?" she crooned, gathering Emmy's teardampened hair from her face into a ponytail. "What happened?"

The show of concern brought with it a fresh stream of tears; Emmy was sobbing so hard her tiny body trembled. Leigh ran through the possibilities of what could cause such pain, and came up with only three: a death in the family, a pending death in the family, or a man.

"Sweetie, is it your parents? Did something happen to them? To Izzie?"

Emmy shook her head.

"Talk to me, Emmy. Is everything okay with Duncan?"

This elicited a wail so plaintive it hurt Leigh to hear it. Bingo.

"Over," Emmy cried, her voice catching in her throat. "It's over for good."

Emmy had made this pronouncement no fewer than eight times in the five years she and Duncan had been dating, but something about tonight seemed different.

"Honey, I'm sure it's all just -- "

"He ...

Customer Reviews

very disconnected
I was really excited when I picked up this book. As I read I kept wanting to give it a chance, but was always disappointed. The characters start shallow, and they end just the same. I don't see any real development throughout.

Fun travel book
This book saved me during a 9 hour bus trip. It was a totally fun, light read, that was very Sex and the City. I found myself thinking about he characters days after I was finished with the book - I grew attached! The book is well researched and very current. I did think that the beginning was slow and the trip to Bonaire could have been a lot funnier. Some parts were even repetitive (Adriana's beauty). However, there were many pleasant twists and surprises and I loved the development with the bird! Overall it was a happy, fun, & light read, and I am happy that I read it!

Three best friends. Two resolutions. One year to pull it off.
This is the story of three great friends living in Manhattan and looking to change their lives around and shake things up to get married and live happily ever especially now that they are nearing 30.
Emmy is now single because her boyfriend Duncan left her for the trainer she herself had paid for him... talk about irony!!
She was this close to the ring and the baby she's wanted her whole life but now she is ordering take out for one and is looking to find herself a man but her friends tell her she should sleep around a bit and forget about dreaming of Mr. Right. She will embark in the adventure and will do her best to forget her prim and proper attitude and begin her tour de whore.
Adriana is a famous drop dead gorgeous supermodel who has been born in Brazil and raised in the USA by her rich parents who are always paying her bills.
She is also about to turn 30 and is considering her mother's advice about men... beauty is ephemeral, there's always someone younger and prettier right around the corner to steal your man so it's better to pick one soon and to settle with him.
And finally there's Leigh, a young star in the publishing business who is within striking distance of landing her dream job as senior editor and marrying her dream guy... or maybe Russell isn't really her dream guy but he is the dream guy of every other woman she knows. To top it all off Leigh is chosen to edit the well known Jesse Chapman "enfant terrible of the literary world" who is brilliant and brooding and a genius and who has her go to his house in the Hamptons to work with him since he doesn't like to work anywhere else!! As you can imagine on one of those trips to the Hamptons to work on Jesse's new book they end up under the sheets and Leigh experiences the best lovemaking of her entire life.
Emmy will have to sleep around, Adriana will have to have a serious and monogamous relationship for the very first time in her life and Leigh, well Leigh appears to have it all and her life appears to be perfect... but do you really think this is so?
Read on and check out what happens...