WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOKS OF 2022 ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022 LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE “Buzzy and enthralling …A glorious novel about empires and erasures, husbands and wives, staggering fortunes and unspeakable misery…Fun as hell to read.” —Oprah Daily "A genre-bending, time-skipping story about New York City’s elite in the roaring ’20s and Great Depression."—Vanity Fair “A riveting story of class, capitalism, and greed.” —Esquire "Exhilarating.” —New York Times 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 daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit. Hernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation. At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

No one loved Trust, but no one hated Trust either. But in that middle space, there was a wild difference of opinion about what the good parts and what the bad parts were. What we agreed was that the novel was fundamentally about how a number of people around Bevin and his wife Mildred were trying to spin the story of their lives in various ways and that led to some good moments of differing perspectives on a person's legacy. That was basically all we agreed on. Most of us felt that the structure of the book was flawed in that the first two stories were fairly thin and one-dimensional because they were such obvious attempts at manipulation of Mildred's identity, but then some of us really liked those sections as an elevated beach-read story about a messed up wealthy family. Some of thought the third section from the perspective of Ida, Bevel's ghost writer, the most complex and human, but others felt it didn't belong in the book because it was outside the core theme of how Mildred was presented. We all had different takes on the final chapter -- on how trustworthy Mildred was, how mad she was, what Bevel was doing, and what it meant for the veracity of the previous questions. Overall, the novel was either intriguing in its mysteries or confusing in its lack of clues, depending on your generosity. There were some clear flaws, the most glaring being that the idea that any one person caused the Great Depression is laughable and while we were willing to believe that Diaz knew that, it was frustrating that it was never given voice by a remotely trustworthy voice in the novel. There were certainly interesting moments -- the relationship between Ida and her father, Mildred's comments on music, some of the notes in the second chapter pointing to the inventions there, the moment when Ida realizes that Bevel has absorbed one of her fictions about Mildred as fact. None of us thought that Diaz was sloppy or incompetent in the book. It was just too fuzzy in places. Those who liked it thought those were minor and didn't detract from an entertaining and easy to read novel; those who didn't thought it was a flawed experiment at ambiguity that just left you frustrated. Your mileage is going to vary on this one if our very diverse takes on this book and its quality are any indication.