In the glitz and glamour tradition of Beatriz Williams’s Tiny Little Thing and Fiona Davis’s The Chelsea Girls, Danielle Martin’s debut novel features a dress boutique turned underground women’s social club where women from all walks of life come for support and sisterhood.

1962. In the middle of Brooklyn Heights sits the Starlite: boutique dress shop by day, underground women’s club by night. Started by the shop’s proprietor after her marriage to a prominent councilman crumbled, Madeline’s social club soon becomes a safe haven for women from all walks of life looking for a respite from their troubled relationships and professional frustrations. These after-hour soirées soon bring two very different women into Madeline’s life—Elaine, a British ex-pat struggling with an unpredictable fiancé, and Lisa, a young stewardess whose plans for the future are suddenly upended—irrevocably changing all three women’s lives in ways no one could have predicted.

But when Madeline’s ne’er-do-well ex-husband shows up again, the luster of Starlite quickly dampens. As the sisterhood rallies around Madeline, tension begins to eat at the club. When an unspeakable tragedy befalls their sorority, one woman must decide whether to hide the truth from the group or jeopardize her own hopes and dreams. Glimmer As You Can captures the heartbeat of an era and the ambitions of a generation of women living in a man’s world—a world threatened by a wave of change.