Dear Great Book Guru, I loved your suggestion last week of THE GREAT GATSBY and was wondering if you can think of another book with a similar theme and setting ?   A Great Gatsby Fan

Dear Great Gatsby Fan, I have the perfect book for you: THE WINNER by Teddy Wayne.   Connor O’Toole is a twenty-five-year-old recent law school graduate who lands a dream summer job - teaching tennis at Cutters Neck - a very exclusive gated community near Cape Cod. The job comes with a lovely cottage.  During the year he lives with his sickly mother in a shabby, cramped apartment in Yonkers and he is burdened with mountains of credit card debt and school loans.  Covid fears permeate his daily existence. Life at Cutters Neck changes all this.  He quickly finds himself immersed in a romantic entanglement with his first student:  Catherine - a very wealthy, much older woman. When he meets her daughter, things become complicated, very complicated. Throughout Connor is confronted and confounded by the disparities of wealth and status all around him.  At times he is grateful to his benefactors but more often he is angry as he observes the privilege that wealth confers. This anger causes him to make some horrific choices and suddenly we begin to realize Connor has tricked us and everyone else he encounters.  The character he most resembles is not Jay Gatsby – a mysterious yet sympathetic figure - but the amoral, dangerously duplicitous Tom Ripley in THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY.  Highly Recommended!