Under his sole direction, the company kept flourishing, and it did not take him long to become one of the most prominent tobacco traders on the Eastern Seaboard. Three generations later, Benjamin's father, Solomon, bought out all his relatives and outside investors. Over the next century, their business prospered and expanded to the extent that part of the family moved to America so they could better oversee their suppliers and control every aspect of production.

According to the back of the Rask family Bible, in 1662 his father's ancestors had migrated from Copenhagen to Glasgow, where they started trading in tobacco from the Colonies. As such, one of the greatest strengths of this novel is its pleasing unpredictability which guarantees the reader an exhilarating experience.Because he had enjoyed almost every advantage since birth, one of the few privileges denied to Benjamin Rask was that of a heroic rise: his was not a story of resilience and perseverance or the tale of an unbreakable will forging a golden destiny for itself out of little more than dross. The grand design of Trust is purposefully constructed so the very foundations of the work itself cannot be trusted – the unreliable narrator as a device has found its ultimate expression here by Diaz. Who and what we can trust within the complex morality structures of a capitalist world is examined on both a micro and a macro level to great effect. The result is a novel that spans the entirety of the 20th century, provoking the reader to confront the deceptions in society that sustain us.

Each evolution is a revelation that deepens the reading experience without any inertia creeping in. The competing narratives across the four streams interrogate fact vs fiction, as the narrator desperately tries to extract the truth from the murky manipulations of the affluent elite. One account is told in the form of a novel within the novel, Bonds, that in this fictional scenario has become a publishing sensation in its own right.

The four overlapping sections of Trust offer different versions of the life of 1920s New York financier and Wall Street legend, Benjamin Rask. A literary conundrum, composed of four books in one, this surprising, engrossing and beautifully executed novel confirms Diaz’s status as a virtuoso of storytelling. Destined to become one of the great novels of our time, this ingenious work more than lives up to the hype. Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, Trust by US novelist Hernan Diaz is published on this side of the pond in the wake of profusive critical acclaim.

Hernan diaz trust review