Q1 2025 Graduate Student Book Club Announcement - Trust By Hernan Diaz

This is the first book we are completing as a part of this Graduate Student Book Club!

Trust won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023 and has been lauded as one of The New York Times's 100 best books of the 21st Century. It was one of Barack Obama's favorite books of 2022 and was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.

None of us have had a chance to read this before now, but we are extremely excited to kick the New Year off with this book and hope that you will join us in reading it! Discussion will be posted mid March with an announcement of the next book.

Here's the write up for it: "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."