Trust
Hernan Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning second novel is built as four nested books, each told by a different narrator, each correcting and contradicting the one before. The first is a 1937 society novel in the manner of Edith Wharton, depicting the rise of a fictional financier named Benjamin Rask and the slow disintegration of his wife Helen. The second is the unfinished memoir of Andrew Bevel, a real-feeling Wall Street tycoon enraged by the novel's portrait of him and determined to set the record straight. The third is the recollections of Ida Partenza, the Brooklyn typist Bevel hired in the late 1930s to ghostwrite that memoir. The fourth is the private journal of Bevel's late wife Mildred, brilliant, ill, and silenced. Diaz uses the architecture to examine how American capital has always written its own history and erased the women whose intelligence underwrote it.
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What you might want to know about Trust
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Hernan Diaz tells the same New York fortune four times. First as Bonds, a 1937 best-seller about a Wall Street financier and his frail wife.
Yes. Hernan Diaz's Trust won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, sharing the award with Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.
The novel is told in four parts that contradict and reframe each other. Readers should expect to actively reassess what they have learned with each new section.
Yes, HBO announced an adaptation starring Kate Winslet, with production reported in development.
Trust was written by Hernan Diaz, published in 2022 by Riverhead Books.
Trust is 416 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Trust takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
Trust is a standalone novel by Hernan Diaz, not part of a series.
Trust is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
