The Green Hat

Michael Arlen caught the mood of London’s postwar smart set with this glittering, melancholy bestseller. Iris Storm, glamorous and shadowed by scandal, drives a yellow Hispano-Suiza through the drawing rooms and night haunts of Mayfair, trailing rumor wherever she goes. Behind her reputation for reckless affairs lie a private loyalty and a wound she will not name, and the narrator is slowly drawn into the tragedy hidden beneath her poise. Arlen writes the loves, poses, and disillusionment of a generation that survived the war and cannot decide what to do with its freedom. The book made him famous and later reached the stage and screen. Sophisticated, sad, and very much of the 1920s. First published in 1924. Free to read here in PDF and EPUB.