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THE OTHER TYPIST

Suzanne Rindell

Notes on a Scandal meets Rules of Civility and The Talented Mr. Ripley, as a female typist at a New York police station in the Roaring Twenties becomes obsessed with the new woman in the typing pool.
In 1922 Rose Baker is a typist in the New York City Police Department on the Lower East Side. Confessions are her job. The criminals admit to their crimes, and like a high priestess, Rose records their every word. Often she is the only woman present, and while she may hear about shootings, knifings, and crimes of passion, as soon as she leaves the interrogation room she is once again the weaker sex, best suited for making coffee and staying quiet. But it’s the beginning of a new era for women, and 1920’s New York is a confusing time and place for Rose. Gone are the Victorian standards of what is acceptable. Now women bob their hair short like men, smoke cigarettes in public, and drink heavily in speakeasies. But prudish Rose is stuck in the fading light of yesteryear, searching for the nurturing companionship that eluded her childhood and clinging to the Victorian ideal of sisterhood. Enter Odalie, a dazzling and mysterious new addition to the typing pool. Despite Rose’s best intentions, she falls under Odalie’s spell. As the two women navigate between the sparkling underworld of speakeasies by night and their work at the station by day, Rose is drawn fully into Odalie's high-stakes world—and her fascination with Odalie turns into an obsession from which she may never recover. Suzanne Rindell is currently in the dissertation phase of the Ph.D. program in English literature at Rice University. Her concentration is in twentieth-century American modernism, and her research provided the original impetus for this novel. She has published short fiction and poetry in Conjunctions, Nimrod, StorySouth, Crab Orchard Review, and Cream City Review. She formerly worked at the Emma Sweeney Agency.
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Published 2013-05-01 by Amy Einhorn Books

Book

Published 2013-05-01 by Amy Einhorn Books

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You could make a one-sitting read of The Other Typist: it maintains the riveting dance of question-provoking answers that earn page-turners their name, and Suzanne Rindell’s Jazz Age NYC is gritty, glamorous, and utterly absorbing. Nevertheless, there’s something just as satisfying about the way Rose Baker and her ever-darkening story haunt your imagination between readings. Whenever you close the covers, have a book friend handy—you’ll want to talk about The Other Typist.

Debut Author Snapshot: A New York City resident and a Ph.D. candidate in American modernist literature at Rice University, Rindell shares with Goodreads some of the period atmosphere that inspired her characters. Read more...

Well-crafted noir...Rindell’s grasp on how to weave genre, characters, narration, and setting into a compelling tale on her first time out makes her an author worth watching closely. Read more...

The accolades continue to stream in – Barnes & Noble and Amazon join Parade, Marie Claire, and Publishers Weekly in declaring THE OTHER TYPIST one of the best books of May/summer. Read more...

Cinematic scenes… make The Other Typist a thrilling riff on the classic noir and an impressive first novel. Read more...

An unreliable narrator makes this enchanting jazz-age thriller a clever and addictive debut...The Other Typist is clever, addictive entertainment. Read more...

THE OTHER TYPIST is an intriguing model of storytelling and a fascinating portrayal of the lies we tell ourselves and others. Read more...

Take a dollop of Alfred Hitchcock, a dollop of Patricia Highsmith, throw in some Great Gatsby flourishes, and the result is Rindell’s debut, a pitch-black comedy about a police stenographer accused of murder in 1920s Manhattan.

I picked up a galley of The Other Typist on a whim, and from the first page was absorbed: I haven’t been able to put it down. Suzanne Rindell’s story of a 1920s police stenographer who becomes increasingly obsessed with a glamorous new typist reminds me at points of Notes on a Scandal and Patricia Highsmith, but has creepy charms all its own.

UK: Fig Tree/Penguin Catalan: Rosa dels Vents/PRH Chinese (complex): Azoth Chinese (simplified): Shanghai Translation Czech: Jota Danish: Turbulenz Dutch: Agathon/Unieboek (now Meulenhoff-Boekerij) French: Fleuve Noir German: BTB Italian: Nord Japanese: Tokyo Sogensha Lithuanian: Vaga Polish: Znak Russian: Phantom Spanish: Lumen/PRH

The Other Typist by Suzanne Rindell (Fig Tree, £12.99) is being compared to Zoe Heller’s Notes On A Scandal, except it is set in New York during the Roaring Twenties.

It's a riveting ride both through Prohibition New York and the psyche of two young women caught up in the crime and excitement of the time. Rindell also pays homage to another literary treasure set in the '20s — F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby's ability to re-create himself is a theme that haunts The Other Typist. Read more...

The Other Typist’ by Suzanne Rindell is a period piece set in the 1920s, about a woman who’s a typist for the New York City Police Department. Beyond that I don’t know much more, but I can feel myself tense up a little, pleasurably, in anticipation.

This eerie and compelling debut is a riveting page-turner, narrated by a strangely hypnotic yet dubious young woman who works as a typist for the NYPD in the 1920s. Don’t start this novel at night if you need your beauty sleep—you’ll stay up to all hours devouring its pages.

Set in 1920s Manhattan, Suzanne Rindell’s much anticipated debut novel “The Other Typist” follows Rose Baker, a typist in a New York City Police Department precinct on the Lower East Side. In this enchanting, sometimes eerie story, Rose struggles to assert her identity as a woman torn between her role in the interrogation room – where, through her recordings of crimes, she has the power to determine men’s fates – and her role outside the interrogation room – where she is constantly reminded that she is of the weaker sex, subjecting to demands to file papers and make coffee. ... Read more...

No one has ever loved Rose. She was an orphan, she has no friends and she works as a typist in a police precinct. Then one day the beautiful and fascinating Odalie joins the typist pool and Rose’s life is transformed overnight. Odalie takes her out and about and introduces her tospeakeasies and gin—but will there be a price to pay for all this love? Glitz and sleaze collides in this tale of a claustrophobic and dangerous friendship in 1920s New York City.

The Other Typist is an engrossing tale with a terrific ending. A good choice for those who are drawn to psychological thrillers. Read more...

Suzanne Rindell messes with your head. The Other Typist pretends to be the story of a nice young woman entering the cutthroat world of police work in 1920's New York. But it's New York, not the nice young woman, who should be trembling. I had a blast reading this and had my nerves scrambled by the end.

one of popular UK women’s magazine Stylist’s “Cult Books of 2013.” Read more...

With hints toward The Great Gatsby, Rindell’s novel aspires to recreate Prohibition-era New York City, both its opulence and its squalid underbelly. She captures it quite well, while at the same time spinning a delicate and suspenseful narrative about false friendship, obsession, and life for single women in New York during Prohibition.

Rindell's debut is a cinematic page-turner.

Keira Knightley to Produce and Star in 'The Other Typist' (Exclusive)

As you read this remarkable first novel, you will feel the room temperature drop. It’s chilling till the very end.

A story of glamour, prohibition, obsession and corruption, with a fantastic Hitchcockian twist, The Other Typist is a great way to kick off a summer of reading. Read more...

What a deliciously devilish debut…. Rindell’s prose is rich with vivid turns of phrase and imagery that dazzles like the tassels on a flapper’s frock, but her real coup is the creation of meek little Rose—who is actually anything but.

Other Typist is a twisty yarn that drives the reader through the story in a frenzied quest to discover what’s real and what isn’t. Rose, the unreliable narrator, tells the tale of an even more unreliable woman, and Suzanne Rindell plays them both to perfection.

Ever so noir and a touch Gatsbyesque… Suzanne Rindell has written a novel so cinematic that it reads as if it’s in preproduction. The Other Typist is seductive, shady fun, an ideal read for the beach on West Egg. Read more...

This thrilling page-turner cinematically captures the opulence—and sordidness—of the Prohibition Era in New York. Read more...