An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception
Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth - all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.
Hernan Diaz's TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another - and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.
At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.
Hernan Diaz is the author of two novels translated into more than twenty languages. His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has also written a book of essays, and his work has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Playboy, The Yale Review, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
"Intricate, cunning and consistently surprising...Much of the novel's pleasure derives from its unpredictabiility...Add Henry James to Wharton, and Thomas Mann too...Exhilarating and intelligent novel." - New York Times
"A rip-roaring, razor-sharp dissection of capitalism, class, greed, and the meaning of money itself that also manages to be a dazzling feat of storytelling on its own terms... Important and timely. But the uniquely brilliant way in which Diaz tells that story, as meticulously researched as it is narratively exhilarating, makes it a novel not just for the present age but for the ages." - Vogue
"[A] riveting story of class, capitalism, and greed. The result is a mesmerizing metafictional alchemy of grand scope and even grander accomplishment." - Esquire
Literary fiction...is a fantastic commodity in which our best writers become criminals of the imagination, stealing our attention and our very desires. Diaz makes an artistic fortune in Trust. And we readers make out like bandits, too." - Maureen Corrigan, NPR
"A buzzy and enthralling tour de force... a glorious novel about empires and erasures, husbands and wives, staggering fortunes and unspeakable misery...Mostly, though, Trust is a literary page-turner, with a wealth of puns and elegant prose, fun as hell to read." - Oprah Daily
"A remarkably accessible treatise on the power of fiction. This unquestionably smart and sophisticated novel not only mirrors truth, but helps us to better understand it." - The Boston Globe
"Ingenious...challenges conventional story lines of another favorite American theme: capitalism and the accumulation of vast wealth...Diaz employs his inventive structure to offer intriguing insights into the hidden roles played by subservient women." -- Minneapolis Star Tribune
"The world of Trust feels very close to our own...This book is a reminder that wealth isn't a treasure chest and the rich aren't magical, no matter how dramatically they shape the world. It's all just money, made by real people, with very real, often dangerous implications." - Vanity Fair
