This Is How It Starts

From the bestselling author of The People We Hate at the Wedding, Grant Ginder's phenomenal debut novel follows one post-collegiate idealist on his quest to fit in with—and then distance himself from—capital hill's up-and-coming political and social elite who work hard but play harder.

Meet Taylor Mark: a recent college graduate who has moved to Washington, DC, to work for John Grayson, the less-than-brilliant congressman from his home district in Southern California. Washington is a city where deals are made behind closed doors, and there's no one better to teach Taylor—and Grayson—that lesson than Chase Latham, Taylor's former college roommate and the son of a powerful lobbyist.

To Chase, the beltway's bars, restaurants, townhouses, and government offices are one big, debauched playground—a land of milk and honey where secrets are currency, the sex is bipartisan, and rules and boundaries are obsolete. It's a place, Taylor quickly discovers, where the line between right and wrong is razor-thin and loyalty based on college friendship quickly becomes a thing of the past.

This Is How It Starts is a sharp and incisively written novel about how far one young man will go to be an insider in a town that is unyielding in what it will take from a person in exchange for granting him a margin of knowledge and power.