Trust

Author/Guide: Hernan Diaz

Why a Booktrail?

1920s: Power, wealth and truth, told by four unique, interlocking people in 1920s New York

ISBN: B09L8B452R
Genre: Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

The legendary Wall Street tycoon whose immense wealth gives him the power to do almost anything.
The second-generation Italian immigrant tasked with recording his life story.
The reclusive, aristocratic wife.
And the writer who observes them from afar.

In a city devoted to making money and making stories like no other, where wealth means power, who gets to tell the truth? And to rise to the top of a glittering, destructive world, what – and who – do you have to sacrifice?

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New York and the financial district

A novel firmly set in New York’s financial district. This is a novel about the financial crash of 1929, the markets, stocks and shares and everything in between. The theme is trust at large –

“Reading is always an act of trust. Whenever we read anything, from a novel to the label on a prescription bottle, trust is involved. That trust is based on tacit contracts whose clauses I wanted to encourage the reader to reconsider. As you read Trust and move forward from one section to the next, it becomes clear that the book is asking you to question the assumptions with which you walk into a text.”

“Stocks, shares and all that garbage are just claims to a future value. So if money is fiction, finance capital is the fiction of a fiction. That’s what all those criminals trade in: fictions… Money is at the core of it all. An illusion we’ve all agreed to support. Unanimously.”

“While grateful for it, he was suspicious of the American notion of freedom, which he viewed as a strict synonym of conformism, or, even worse, the mere possibility of choosing between different versions of the same product.”