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Lady Ela Dalvi knows the exact moment her life was forever changed—when her best friend, Poppy, betrayed her without qualm over a boy, the son of a duke. She was sent away in disgrace, her reputation ruined.

Nearly three years later, eighteen-year-old Ela is consumed with bitterness and a desire for . . . revenge. Her enemy is quickly joining the crème de la crème of high society while she withers away in the English countryside.

With an audacious plan to get even, Ela disguises herself as a mysterious heiress and infiltrates London’s elite. But when Ela reunites with the only boy she’s ever loved, she begins to question whether vengeance is still her greatest desire.

In this complicated game of real-life chess, Ela must choose her next move: Finally bring down the queen or capture the king’s heart?

I think what I’m trying to say is that I’ve been wanting to become friends with the Woman in the Purple Skirt for a very long time…

Almost every afternoon, the Woman in the Purple Skirt sits on the same park bench, where she eats a cream bun while the local children make a game of trying to get her attention. Unbeknownst to her, she is being watched–by the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, who is always perched just out of sight, monitoring which buses she takes, what she eats, whom she speaks to.

From a distance, the Woman in the Purple Skirt looks like a schoolgirl, but there are age spots on her face, and her hair is dry and stiff. She is single, she lives in a small apartment, and she is short on money–just like the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, who lures her to a job as a housekeeper at a hotel, where she too is a housekeeper. Soon, the Woman in the Purple Skirt is having an affair with the boss and all eyes are on her. But no one knows or cares about the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan. That’s the difference between her and the Woman in the Purple Skirt.

Studiously deadpan and chillingly voyeuristic, and with the off-kilter appeal of the novels of Ottessa Moshfegh, The Woman in the Purple Skirt explores envy, loneliness, power dynamics, and the vulnerability of unmarried women in a taut, suspenseful narrative about the sometimes desperate desire to be seen.

On paper, Zoe Zeng has made it in New York’s fashion world. After a string of unpaid internships, she’s now a fashion columnist at Chic, lives in a quaint apartment in Manhattan, and gets invited to exclusive industry events.

But life in New York City isn’t as chic as Zoe imagined. Her editor wants her to censor her opinions to please the big brands; she shares her “quaint” (read: small) apartment with three roommates who never let her store kimchi in the fridge; and how is she supposed to afford the designer clothes expected for those parties on her meager salary?

Then one day, Zoe receives a job offer at FitPick, an app startup based in Silicon Valley. The tech salary and office perks are sweet, but moving across the country and switching to a totally new industry? Not so much. However, with her current career at a dead end, Zoe accepts the offer and swaps high fashion for high tech, haute couture for HTML. But she soon realizes that in an industry claiming to change the world for the better, not everyone’s intentions are pure. With an eight-figure investment on the line, Zoe must find a way to revamp FitPick’s image despite Silicon Valley’s elitism and her icy colleagues. Or the company’s future will go up in smoke—and hers with it.