The Guardian review
Musa Okwonga (born 11 October 1979) is a British author, podcaster, and musician.
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.
Hernan Diaz (born 1973) is a writer. His 2017 novel In the Distance was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He also received a Whiting Award.
Although Diaz was born in Argentina and raised in Sweden, he has spent most of his life living in the United States.
He received a doctorate of philosophy from New York University. Diaz has received fellowships from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Ingmar Bergman Estate.[6]
Diaz has published two novels, which have been published in more than 20 languages.
