(CNN) -- Pour yourself a cold martini, make sure it's extra dry, put some classic jazz on the stereo, a mournful saxophone is a must, and settle in with one of the best-reviewed novels of the year, "Rules of Civility." 

Written by first-time novelist Amor Towles, a principal at a Manhattan investment firm, the book has shot up the best-seller charts and is drawing rave reviews from critics. It's a nostalgic love letter to New York of the late '30s, a novel of manners with lofty aspirations that evokes some of the classics of American literature. 

The story unfolds largely in flashback, set on New Year's Eve in Manhattan 1937. The Jazz Age is over, the Depression in its final days, World War II just over the horizon. At its outset, there is a budding love triangle between Katey Kontent, that's "kon-tent, like the state of being"; her boardinghouse roommate, Eve; and a handsome banker, Theodore "Tinker" Grey, but an unexpected accident sends the story in a more serious direction. 

Katey is the narrator and the wry heart of this novel. She's a young woman of "poise and purpose." Brooklyn-born, the daughter of immigrant laborers, she works in a Wall Street secretarial pool though aspires to much more. 

Alongside a supporting cast with WASPy nicknames like Dicky, Bitsy and Peaches, Katey navigates her way through Manhattan jazz clubs and Long Island cocktail parties and into the upper echelons of New York society. 

The novel takes its title from young George Washington's "Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation"; you'll find all 110 of them in the novel's appendix. These rules are described as "a do-it-yourself charm school. A sort of How to Win Friends and Influence People 150 years ahead of its time." 
Where is the book set?
set on New Year's Eve in Manhattan 1937