Trust

Trust is a 2022 postmodern novel by Hernan Diaz. Longlisted for the Booker Prize, Trust is the second novel by Diaz, whose first book, In the Distance (2017), was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Primarily about a financier, Andrew Bevel—who becomes the richest man in the world by shorting the stock market crash of 1929—Trust contains four distinct books in which different characters provide conflicting accounts of the financier and his wife. The compounding narratives explore the power of wealth, the artifice of the financial system, and the gender politics inherent in both.

This guide uses the 2022 Riverhead Books paperback edition.

Plot Summary

The first book in Trust is a novel within a novel, a bestselling roman à clef titled Bonds, by Harold Vanner. Bonds follows the investor Benjamin Rask and his wife, Helen. Vanner bases the Rasks on Andrew and Mildred Bevel, who appear in the following three books in Trust. Andrew Bevel is an investing savant who becomes the richest man in the world by shorting the stock market crash of 1929. Mildred Bevel is a music lover and philanthropist who dies at a young age from cancer.

In Bonds, Rask is presented as an asocial, dispassionate boy born into a long line of successful tobacco traders.