Picador 2009, pehmeäkantinen, 455 sivua.

The novel received mostly rave reviews from a wide variety of media sources.[3][4][5] Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote that Lush Life was "a visceral, heart-thumping portrait of New York City" and "no one writes better dialogue than Richard Price—not Elmore Leonard, not David Mamet, not even David Chase."[6] The Hartford Courant praised Price's ability to "embrace irony without ever being ham-handed and to create characters who refuse to be pinned down".[7] Others called it "powerful"[8] and a "damned good book",[9] and said that "every sentence is a pleasure".[10]

Salon writer Richard B. Woodward called the book "astonishing", but "more a collection of brilliantly realistic scenes than a book with moral weight or a convincing vision of the way New York functions in the Bloomberg era".[11] The Los Angeles Timespraised it as "deftly written" and "beautifully expressive", but thought that "Price can't quite bridge the gap between this social novel and the subtleties of real life".[12]

Lush Life was a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.[13]

The novel gained further attention when it was revealed that U.S. President Barack Obama would be reading it during his 2009 summer vacation