Author Patricia Nicol reveals a selection of the best books on: The super rich 

This evening, my husband and I will shoo our kids to bed, eat a frugal evening meal (almost certainly soup), then watch Succession.

If I am honest, I feel a little grubby about just how invested I am in the fate of the squillionaire Roy children, warring heirs to a media empire.

They are objectively not very nice people, yet watching these over-privileged one-percenters has been one of the TV highlights of this long Covid-cost-of-living crisis.

See too White Lotus, the super-rich en vacances.

Why do those of us forced to penny-pinch find such tales so gloriously entertaining? Schadenfreude, I suppose. Or is it empathy?

What the car-crash storylines of Succession and all these novels show is that it’s true: money really can’t buy you love

One of this spring’s most hyped fiction releases, Pineapple Street, by Jenny Jackson, is also set among Manhattan’s wealthy elite.

For the Stocktons, life is a carousel of charity fundraisers, parties, dinners out and tennis.

Work is either in wealth creation (banking or the family property firm) or divesting (the charity sector).

For a marrying-in outsider like the likeable Sasha — disparaged as ‘the gold-digger’ by her sisters-in-law — it is an arcane, often absurd world.

Jackson’s entertaining, if insufficiently satirical, page-turner nods to golden age American novelists such as Henry James and Edith Wharton, who often made the rigid hierarchies and status anxieties of New York’s wealthiest their subject.

James’s The Portrait Of A Lady promotes Isabel Archer from genteel poverty to gilded heiress.

But this good fortune is also a misfortune, making her the target of heartless speculators.

Another classic, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, is updated to contemporary London in Vesna Goldsworthy’s Gorsky.

Here, Fitzgerald’s lovelorn Jazz Age bootlegger is a Russian oligarch mooning after a girl he once slept with — Natalya, now the wife of a British banker.

Who wants to be a millionaire? Well, I do. But what the car-crash storylines of Succession and all these novels show is that it’s true: money really can’t buy you love.