“A four-narrative novel about a Gilded Age financier, his wife, the ghostwriter of his memoir, and the woman who finally tells the true story. Pulitzer Prize 2023.”
What's in this book
- Hernan Diaz's 2022 novel — four nested narratives about a Gilded Age financier
- Pulitzer Prize 2023 (co-winner with Demon Copperhead) — the most-discussed contemporary American novel about capitalism
- 416 pages of period-pastiche prose across four distinct voices about the same events
- Edoardo Ballerini / Jonathan Davis / Mozhan Marno / Orlagh Cassidy four-voice audiobook is the definitive audio production
- 2025 HBO limited series adaptation with Kate Winslet is in production
- For readers of Cloud Atlas, The Goldfinch, and contemporary structurally ambitious literary fiction
Buy this book
Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.
Trust is Hernan Diaz's 2022 novel, the Pulitzer Prize co-winner of 2023 and the most-discussed literary commercial novel about American capitalism in a generation. The novel is structured as four nested narratives about the same approximate set of events. Book one is Bonds, a fictional 1937 financial novel about Benjamin Rask, a quiet Gilded Age financier whose wife Helen dies young after a mental breakdown. Book two is My Life, the unfinished autobiography of Andrew Bevel, the real-life Gilded Age financier on whom Rask was loosely based. Book three is A Memoir, Remembered, the autobiography of Ida Partenza, the Brooklyn typist hired in the 1930s to ghostwrite Bevel's autobiography for him. Book four is Futures, the recovered diary of Mildred Bevel, the wife whose breakdown the previous three books have tried to explain.
Diaz's project is to write a four-voice novel that interrogates how the historical record of American capitalism has been edited by the men who controlled it. The Bonds chapter is a pitch-perfect pastiche of 1930s middlebrow financial fiction. The My Life chapter is the cold institutional voice of a man dictating his own legacy. The Ida chapter does the structural work of letting the reader watch the editorial machinery operate in real time. The Mildred chapter in book four is the literary masterstroke of the novel and earns the gut-punch the structural design has been promising. Diaz reportedly studied the actual editorial papers of multiple Gilded Age financial memoirs to get the period voice right.
Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as one of the canonical literary novels of the 2020s, and for fans of Edith Wharton, Henry James, and the broader American-finance literary tradition. Compare to William Gaddis's J R and the Sebastian Junger / Eric Larson Gilded Age non-fiction. The Edoardo Ballerini / Jonathan Davis / Mozhan Marno / Orlagh Cassidy four-voice audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
Related reads
If you liked Trust
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Beloved by Toni Morrison 1987 review. Sethe, a former slave living in Reconstruction-era Ohio, is haunted by the daughter she killed to save from slavery. Pulitzer Prize 1988 and one of the canonical American novels of the late twentieth century.
Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy 1985 review. A nameless teenager joins a band of Indian-hunters along the Texas-Mexico border in 1849. The most violent American novel of the late twentieth century and the rare McCarthy book that demands the prose attention it requires.
Bring Up the Bodies
by Hilary Mantel
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel 2012 review. Thomas Cromwell engineers the fall of Anne Boleyn and the rise of Jane Seymour. Booker Prize 2012, the second volume of the Cromwell trilogy, and the rare novel that exceeds an already-canonical predecessor.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
by James McBride
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride 2023 review. A 1972 skeleton found at the bottom of a Pottstown, Pennsylvania well sends the novel back to a 1930s neighborhood where Black, Jewish, and immigrant families lived alongside each other. The most important American novel of 2023.
The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 2016 review. Cora, a slave on a Georgia plantation, escapes north via an actual underground railroad, a literalized version of the metaphor. Pulitzer Prize 2017 and the National Book Award winner that defined the contemporary Black literary moment.
Wolf Hall
by Hilary Mantel
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel 2009 review. Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's son who rose to serve Henry VIII, reorganizes the English state at the cost of his own soul. Booker Prize 2009 and the most important historical novel of the twenty-first century.
More by this author