How long is it?
416 pages in the Riverhead Books 2023 paperback edition.

Fiction · Literary Fiction · Mystery & Thriller · Historical Fiction
About 8 h 15 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 17 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
Wall Street financier Benjamin Rask and his wife Helen belong to New York’s richest circles in the 1920s, as speculation swells ahead of the crash. Their marriage and the origins of their fortune supply the story of Bonds, the fictional novel that opens Trust. Other versions compete with that telling, while a woman tries to separate what happened from what has been written.
Built from four documents written in distinct voices for different purposes, the historical novel asks you to compare accounts and notice omissions. Reading it means repeatedly reconsidering the authority of each narrator; the story accumulates through competing claims instead of following a continuous narrative.
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
Highly regarded
416 pages in the Riverhead Books 2023 paperback edition.
Riverhead Books · 2023 · paperback. ISBN 9780593420324.
About 8 hours 15 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 416-page Riverhead Books edition. Dense books can take longer.
Hernán Díaz writes historical fiction that revisits familiar American myths by changing the angle of narration. In Trust, the story of a Wall Street fortune is divided among four competing texts, each exposing how wealth can shape the record of marriage and public life. In the distance approaches the frontier from the opposite direction, following a Swedish boy east while settlers move west. Its spare, atmospheric descriptions and episodic encounters make the landscape strange and unstable rather than heroic. Díaz repeatedly uses outsiders, documents, rumor, and conflicting voices to examine how power turns partial accounts into accepted history.



Marlon James
Literary Fiction · Historical Fiction · Mystery & Thriller

Paul Auster
Literary Fiction · Mystery & Thriller · Literary fiction



