Trust
by Hernan Diaz
Because it's easier to talk about money than about what money represents.
Why read it
A Gilded Age Wall Street financier and his enigmatic wife become the subjects of a popular novel about their obscene wealth, and then the real man sets out to control the story, hiring a ghostwriter to bury the book's version of the truth beneath his own.
Trust is built from competing texts about the same New York fortune: a bestselling novel, a tycoon's self-serving memoir, the memoir-ghostwriter's account, and a final voice that overturns them all. Each version contradicts the last, and the novel dramatizes how money buys not only power but the ability to author reality itself, until the woman written out of every account finally speaks.
Hernan Diaz's second novel was published in 2022 and won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (shared) along with the Kirkus Prize. It became a critical sensation for its structural ambition and was adapted into a television series produced by and starring Kate Winslet.
- 01
Four warring accounts
What awaits is one story told four incompatible ways, each daring you to decide which narrator is lying.
- 02
Money writes history
The tycoon's campaign to suppress a novel shows wealth's deepest power: editing the record of itself.
- 03
The erased wife
Behind every version stands a brilliant woman whose role has been minimized, and whose voice detonates the book.
- 04
Fiction as evidence
By staging documents against each other, the novel makes the reader an investigator of truth and forgery.
The opening novella Bonds, which portrays the financier couple in fictional guise and sets up everything the later sections dispute.
The ghostwriter Ida Partenza's discovery, in the tycoon's private papers, of the diaries that unravel his authorized story.
