From an award-winning chronicler of our nation’s history and its legends comes his much-anticipated novel about wealth and talent, trust and intimacy, truth 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 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 incites gossip. Rumors about Benjamin’s financial maneuvers and Helen’s reclusiveness 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 center of a successful 1938 novel entitled Bonds, which all of New York seems to have read. But it isn’t the only version.
Hernan Diaz’s Trust brilliantly puts the story of these characters into conversation with other accounts–and in tension with the life and perspective of a young woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that becomes more exhilarating and profound with each new layer and revelation. Provocative and propulsive, Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the reality-warping gravitational pull of money and how power often manipulates facts. An elegant, multifaceted epic that recovers the voices buried under the myths that justify our foundational inequality, Trust is a literary triumph with a beating heart and urgent stakes.
Hardcover, 416 pages
Published May 3rd 2022 by Riverhead Books
About Author
Hernan Diaz, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and author of two novels, translated into more than twenty languages, and of a book of essays. He has published stories and essays in Cabinet, The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, Playboy, Granta, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. His first novel, In the Distance, was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. It was also a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year, one of Lit Hub’s Top 20 Books of the Decade, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award.
He has received fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, MacDowell, Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Ingmar Bergman Estate.
