Trust: Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
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WINNER of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for the Booker Prize
One of Barack Obama’s Favourite Books of the Year
The Sunday Times Bestseller
Trust is a sweeping puzzle of a novel about power, greed, love and a search for the truth that begins in 1920s New York.
Can one person change the course of history?
A Wall Street tycoon takes a young woman as his wife. Together, they rise to the top in an age of excess and speculation. Now a novelist is threatening to reveal the secrets behind their marriage. Who will have the final word in their story of greed, love and betrayal?
Composed of four competing versions of this deceptive tale, Trust by Hernan Diaz brings us on a quest for truth while confronting the lies that often live buried in the human heart.
**Soon to be an HBO Limites Series starring Kate Winslet**
‘One of the great puzzle-box novels . . . a page-turner’ – The Telegraph
‘Genius’ – The Observer
‘Radiant, profound and moving’ – Lauren Groff, author of Matrix
‘Metafiction at its best, unpredictable, clever and massively enjoyable’ – The Sunday Times
‘Enthralling’ – Daily Mail
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Additional information
| Publisher | Picador (10 May 2022) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| File size | 2805 KB |
| Text-to-Speech | Enabled |
| Screen Reader | Supported |
| Enhanced typesetting | Enabled |
| X-Ray | Not Enabled |
| Word Wise | Enabled |
| Sticky notes | On Kindle Scribe |
| Print length | 417 pages |
by Luke Dennison
This is the second book in a row that I have read that is essentially a number of books in one novel. The difference with this one, is that the for books are linked, indeed they’re effectively different versions of the same story. The writing here is good, indeed it takes skill to write four versions of the same story but using different voices and make it authentic.
So far so good. However there are issues. The main one is that for me at least, the story is not strong enough to have four different versions of it. The second issue is that the stories are of inconsistent standard. Book one, is an interesting but ultimately underwhelming first version. Book 2, forgettable and uninspiring, book 3, really good and the best by some distance and book 4 which is the big reveal. There is a big dollop of unreliable narrator and it works to a point but Diaz is no Ishiguro. Overall, a decent read with some issues but I’m surprised if won the Pulitzer.
by H. Hammerzon
I am usually not a fan of multi voice novels, but this one crept up on me as I found myself reading the crisp, intellectual prose efficiently and seemingly without pause. There is a mystery of sorts to solve, yet this novel doesn’t insist on the mystery like so many do; the mystery unfolds as the missing pieces of information reveal themselves, feeling as if they emerge from the novel naturally.
by Mark Speed
A good read, but not a great read. I’d not read even the blurb, so went into it really fresh. I was pleased with the way some parts of it panned out. There was a good amount of research by the author, and I doff my cap to him. However, I guessed the twist at quite a distance.
by The Paragon
A proper puzzle of a book. I really enjoyed it and will look forward to rereading it. It took me longer than I’d care to admit to work out what was going on, but I don’t think I’ve read anything like this before.
by R. Greenfield
A book club book! A good read… what is the real story??
by JP Dore
This summer, I found myself immersed in a new book called Trust, by an American author called Hernan Diaz. The focus of his book is not the financial crisis of the early part of this century, but the financial machinations that caused the Great Depression in the 1930s, a crisis initiated by market crashes on Wall Street in 1929, with reverberations around world. Against that backdrop he tells the story of Andrew Bevel, a Rockefeller type who bestrides the financial world accumulating astronomical wealth, like a 1920’s Warren Buffett, but with an emotional vacuity and mystique even amongst those who felt they knew him well.
Suitably then, the story of Bevel’s wealth and his relationship with his young wife is told from four different perspectives; as an adapted novel, by Bevel himself, by his hired researcher Ida, and by Bevel’s wife Mildred. The opening section, a succinct third-person narrative is written in an elegant style, with a brevity of language and tone that is worthily one of the most compelling pieces of storytelling I have read in years. When Ida, Bevel’s brilliant researcher and scribe reads it she is similarly stunned. Then in a claustrophobic nexus of acute illness, big pharma and high-stakes finance, it ends in horror, and personal madness and pain. The next three sections re-tell the tale very differently, of the man, of the money, of the strange genesis of the Bevel’s relationship with Mildred, of her music, patronage of the arts and the intrigues of New York high society. A strange imaginative blend then of Succession, and The Great Gatsby.
But as Diaz takes us deeper down a rabbit hole of mystery and of phantasmagorical wealth – and all the allure that money creates, he ensures we struggle to come to the get to grips with the truth. Quite literally, who do we Trust? The idiosyncratic and contradictory narrative is like John Fowles’ A Maggot, a jigsaw puzzle like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, or Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost. As the reader we have to join the dots, distracted by the contrasting perspectives on the destructive power of unfettered capitalism, set against a caricature of militant anarcho-socialism, literally told from across the Hudson river, far removed from Bevel’s life, as a dirty kitchen sink story. It would be inappropriate and an enormous spoiler to give the game away, but as Diaz lets us dig deeper into the psychological drama of Bevel and Mildred, Diaz reveals the very specific and shocking reason for the Wall Street Crash of 1929, what caused it and why.
by raymond watson
A great read. Not a typical format but it works. Brilliant phrases and ideas throughout. Overall a book about strong women, weak men and the structures that perversely lead to men’s strength and women’s weakness. Well worth the time.
by Michael Wild
‘Trust’ is a period piece, but the author’s style suggests a closer relationship with Dickens than with 1920’s New York.
It is indisputably erudite but methinks the pompous little bear is perhaps a little overstuffed. To quote an example from the text:
“Because she often had to pause and find circumlocutions to bypass grammatical voids and lexical gaps, she gave the impression of having slowed down, of having mastered, in some measure, her anxiety”.
Within the text, this is very clever writing, but was there ever a passage written that could better evoke flock wallpaper and heavy curtains drawn to shut out the fog?
‘For I am a bear of very little brain, and long words bother me.’