GOLDEN HANDCUFFS
Golden Handcuffs
Polly Courtney
UK rights: Troubador
Dutch rights: Artemis
German rights: Heyne
Italian rights: Newton & Compton
All other rights available
Abby and Mike have achieved the impossible. Having spent the past three years cultivating perfect CVs – having played, danced, raced and captained their way to the tops of their respective yeargroups – they have landed themselves with graduate jobs at one of the most prestigious firms in the city: Cray McKinley.The eight thousand-pound ‘golden hellos’ serve as pocket money for their summer-long stay in New York, where the graduates get their first taste of the glamorous, jet-setting lifestyle to come. They’re bright, they’re ambitious, they’re keen, and they’re ready to take on the world.
For Abby, it’s not as easy as she’d anticipated. Try as she might, she just can’t seem to earn people’s respect. Her feeling of uselessness is compounded by the fact that wheezing, spluttering Archie Dickinson assumes her to be his PA, and when Mike suddenly pops up in her department, Abby feels even smaller as he soars straight to the top of the class. There is instant hostility between Abby and Mike – laced with a conflicting sexual attraction.
The novelty of free dinners and cab rides home soon wears off, and Mike finds himself wondering where the ‘play’ element to this ‘work hard, play hard’ regime comes in. His tiresome routine is punctuated by angry outbursts from the heart-attack-prone office bully, Stuart Mackins – a man known for throwing chairs at junior analysts – and the occasional trip to a lap-dancing club. It’s reasonable, he reckons, as lifestyles go, but it’s certainly not the go-getting one they told him about when he applied for the job.
The electricity between Abby and Mike is heightened by fact that they sit six feet apart in the office, and are under constant scrutiny from their colleagues. Mixing business with pleasure is never a good idea is the advice Mike receives from the other first-years during a late-night RedBull session. They’re probably right, of course, but they don’t know the full story. And being ‘just good friends’ with Abby Turner is proving harder than Mike is willing to let on.
Finally, a novel written by a twenty-something for twenty-somethings with a heroine who is more concerned with her career than her make-up.Two million people commute into London every day and according to a recent World Book Day survey, City workers are the keenest readers in the country.Golden Handcuffs will appeal to those who've been there, those who want to get there and those who've heard all about it.
Polly Courtney was brought up in London after a brief period in the United States.At sixteen she transferred to an all-boys grammar school, a move which was to stand her in good stead for the years to come.She spent twelve months testing engines and gearboxes at an automotive consultancy in Sussex, then went on to obtain a double first in Engineering from Cambridge.Along with many of her “high flying” peers, she was lured to the City by the promise of a lucrative, fast-paced career in the exciting world of high finance.What she discovered was something very different.
As soon as she set foot in the Square Mile, Polly realised that there was something to shout about.Being someone who doesn't hold back, she decided to write about how it really is for young graduates in the City, hence her first novel, Golden Handcuffs.She started writing in her first (and only) year at Merrill Lynch and quickly realised that words rather than numbers were where her real talent lay.Having quit banking, she is now working in strategy consulting as well as writing.She also devotes considerable time to her semi-professional all-girl string quartet, No Strings Attached, and to playing with a women's football team.
www.pollycourtney.com
