Guardian Weekly

Show me the money A Citizen Kane-style mystery drives this multilayered tale of a New York tycoon who cashes in when Wall Street crashes

How is reality funded?” asks the wealthy tycoon at the centre of Hernan Diaz’s second novel. His answer is “fiction” – specifically, the “fiction of money”. The value of any commodity comes from us buying into its wider narrative. Unless we trust that a banknote “represents concrete goods”, it is just a piece of printed paper, as open to distortion as a novel, or a memoir, or a diary.

Trust incorporates all three of these literary forms. As with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

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