Trust

Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Even through the roar 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 excite gossip. Rumours 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 centre of a successful 1938 novel entitled Bonds, which all of New York seems to have read. But it isn’t the only version of this story …

Fading financier Andrew Bevel, bedeviled by Bonds, clearly based on his life with his late wife, Mildred, is furious. He hires Ida Partenza, the immigrant daughter of an exiled Italian anarchist, as a secretary. The task he sets her is an act of revenge. Whilst he uses his influence to expunge all evidence of Bonds from the canon, he also intends to strike back with an official memoir, one that will correct Vanner’s falsehoods. Suddenly, Ida finds herself asked to write a portrait of Bevel’s life with a woman he hardly seems to have known. It seems that in Manhattan’s steel-and-glass labyrinth, money warps everything, including reality itself. Decades later Ida Partenza is bent on disentangling fact from fiction.

Provocative and propulsive, and more exhilarating with each new layer and revelation, Trust is a quest for the truth.