The Party Upstairs unfolds in the course of a single day inside of an affluent New York City apartment building, and centers around Ruby and her father Martin, the super. Ruby is no closer to her post-college dream job of creating dioramas like the ones at the Natural History Museum, and has moved back in with her parents in the building’s basement. She’s back in the environment she grew up in: one that makes her painfully aware of being poor when most of the people she knows are not. Her childhood best friend who lives in the penthouse, Caroline, is hosting a party, which Ruby looks forward to and dreads in equal measure. She must face yet again the strange sensation of being included amongst the social and financial elite, a group she neither identifies with nor belongs to. When this novel was presented at a launch meeting, I knew I was interested in working on the cover.