Author(s): Hernán Diaz / Hernan Diaz

Novel | Historical | New York | Fiction Reductions

Even through the roar of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the brilliant daughter of eccentric aristocrats.

Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth. But the secrets around their affluence and grandeur excite gossip.

Rumours start to spread - all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. At what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the centre of a successful 1938 novel entitled Bonds, which all of New York seems to have read. But it isn't the only version of this story. 

Fading financier Andrew Bevel, bedeviled by Bonds, clearly based on his life with his late wife, Mildred, is furious. He hires Ida Partenza, the immigrant daughter of an exiled Italian anarchist, as a secretary. The task he sets her is an act of revenge. Whilst he uses his influence to expunge all evidence of Bonds from the canon, he also intends to strike back with an official memoir, one that will correct Vanner's falsehoods.

Suddenly, Ida finds herself asked to write a portrait of Bevel's life with a woman he hardly seems to have known. It seems that in Manhattan's steel-and-glass labyrinth, money warps everything, including reality itself.

Decades later Ida Partenza is bent on disentangling fact from fiction. Provocative and propulsive, and more exhilarating with each new layer and revelation, Trust is a quest for the truth.

Review: Diaz is a narrative genius whose work easily encompasses both a grand scope and the crisp and whiplike line. Trust builds its world and characters with subtle aplomb. What a radiant, profound and moving novel -- Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
Intricate, cunning and consistently surprising . . . Diaz has the whole literary past at his fingertips . . . [an] exhilarating and intelligent novel * New York Times Book Review *
A sublime, richly layered novel. A story within a story within a story. -- Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist
Trust glints with wonder and knowledge and mystery. Its plotlines are as etched and surreal as Art Deco geometry, while inside that architecture are people who feel appallingly real. This novel is very classical and very original: Balzac would be proud, but so would Borges. -- Rachel Kushner, Man Booker-shortlisted author of The Mars Room
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 . . . Uniquely brilliant . . . exhilarating . . . a novel for the ages. * Vogue *
A virtuoso performance . . . A spellbinding tale that illuminates the impact of money on all of our lives . . . Trust is that rare thing: a beautifully crafted novel that dares to confront some of our deepest socioeconomic schisms * Oprah Daily *
For all its elegant complexity and brilliant construction, Diaz's novel is compulsively readable . . . A captivating tour de force that will astound readers with its formal invention and contemporary relevance. -- Booklist, starred review
In this glorious puzzle of a novel, perspectives keep shifting and the wealth of one early-twentieth-century family keeps changing its origin-story. What a joy this is to read, suspenseful at every turn, the work of a rare and impressive talent. -- Joan Silber, author of Secrets of Happiness
Diaz's Trust exposes the wild power that narrative holds . . . over the economy, historiography, hierarchies, over a person's life, truth, over the reader. A powerful, sinister tale in the form of a nesting doll, around which the modern economy fashions larger and larger macho casings -- Caoilinn Hughes, author of The Wild Laughter
The audacity and scope of Hernan Diaz's extraordinary novel - a prism, a mystery, a revelation - are brilliantly matched by the quality of his prose. -- Jean Strouse, author of Morgan: American Financier
Trust speaks to matters of the most urgent significance to the present day . . . Cleverly constructed and rich in surprises, this splendid novel offers serious ideas and serious pleasures on every beautifully composed page -- Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend

Author Biography: Hernan Diaz's first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the author of a book of essays, and his fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. A recipient of a Whiting Award and the winner of the William Saroyan International Prize, he has been a fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Trust is his second novel.