Trust | Book Review

Front cover of the novel 'Trust' showing a dark skyscraper set against a background of green

Trust

Hernan Diaz

402 pages

Paperback

Picador

2022

ISBN: 9781529074529

Review

‘Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but it is not really we who fail – we are ruined by forces beyond our control.’

Andrew Bevel, a fabulously rich Wall Street trader with a gift for seeing trends before others, and his young wife Mildred bask in 1920s New York. Theirs is a seemingly carefree existence filled with extravagance and speculation. It is only when the layers of their lives are peeled away that we uncover the shocking secrets hidden by their wealth.

‘Trust’ was a book which I dearly wanted to love. A puzzle book set in the jazz age, and a novels-set-within-novels structure to boot? What’s not to love? The book does deliver on some of these promises – 1920s New York is beautifully evoked and the introverted, frantic, obsessive world of the trader makes for compelling copy.

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Deposition | Short Story

There is something about English woodland. Real English woodland, I mean. Not that close-bound, imported Scandi stuff.

I don’t want to be that person who marvels at lonely clouds or tries to catch falling snowflakes, but there is always something happening in every square inch of the forest, from the macro down to the micro. There is the beauty of the overlapping leaves – the razored alders, the elegant crab-apples, the waxen oaks. Then there are the sounds – branches shifting above him, furred bows rubbing against bark strings and a subtle, tenor groan from some ageing monolith deeper in the copse.

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The Woman in White | Book Review

Penguin Classics version of The Woman in White

The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins

569 pages

Paperback

Penguin Books

1868

ISBN: 9780140420245

Review

‘There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road – there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven – stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments…’

Walter Hartright, walk along a lonely, moonlit road are disrupted by his meeting a distressed figure, clad entirely in white. What seems at first to be a coincidental encounter is placed into uneasy context when Hartright takes up his duties at drawing master to half-sisters Marian Halcombe and the beautiful heiress Laura Fairlie. The thin, worried woman in white will prove to be the link between Laura and those determined to wrest her fortune from her.

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