A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism
A novel by Peter Mountford
Having just been hired as an equities analyst by a notoriously rapacious hedge fund, the Fallon Group, 27-year-old Gabriel Francisco de Boya embarks on his first assignment in the field. Set entirely in La Paz at the end of 2005, when Bolivian people are electing their current president, Evo Morales, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism charts Gabriel’s attempts to generate profit from the country’s political transformation. In the face of fantastic financial incentives, he’s forced to confront his doubts about the ethical implications of the work he’s doing; he maintains a complex growing series of lies, including ones he tell to Morale’s press liaison, Lenka Villarobles, with whom he has fallen in love.
Although steeped in complex political issues, the novel avoids polemic, examining the economic effects on a wide variety of people. The characters are often in the position of having to reconcile issues that have powerful personal, cultural, and political implications. They live lives at the sharpest crossroads of privilege and dire poverty, where otherwise sensible motivations are tested by extraordinary circumstances.
A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism is a look inside the little-understood world of high finance and a thorough going exploration of ambition and class and the ash nexus of the unfettered free-market.
Advance praise:
“A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism is, quite simply, one of the most compelling and thought provoking novels I’ve read in years. It’s extraordinarily vivid, populated by character whose fates I cared about desperately, beautifully written, timely beyond measure, but above all it conveys — with impressive precision and nuance — how we are vectors on the grid of global capital; how difficult it is to even attempt to be an authentic, let alone admirable, human being when we are, first and last, cash flow.”
- David Shields
A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism
A novel by Peter Mountford
Having just been hired as an equities analyst by a notoriously rapacious hedge fund, the Fallon Group, 27-year-old Gabriel Francisco de Boya embarks on his first assignment in the field. Set entirely in La Paz at the end of 2005, when Bolivian people are electing their current president, Evo Morales, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism charts Gabriel’s attempts to generate profit from the country’s political transformation. In the face of fantastic financial incentives, he’s forced to confront his doubts about the ethical implications of the work he’s doing; he maintains a complex growing series of lies, including ones he tell to Morale’s press liaison, Lenka Villarobles, with whom he has fallen in love.
Although steeped in complex political issues, the novel avoids polemic, examining the economic effects on a wide variety of people. The characters are often in the position of having to reconcile issues that have powerful personal, cultural, and political implications. They live lives at the sharpest crossroads of privilege and dire poverty, where otherwise sensible motivations are tested by extraordinary circumstances.
A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism is a look inside the little-understood world of high finance and a thorough going exploration of ambition and class and the ash nexus of the unfettered free-market.
Advance praise:
“A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism is, quite simply, one of the most compelling and thought provoking novels I’ve read in years. It’s extraordinarily vivid, populated by character whose fates I cared about desperately, beautifully written, timely beyond measure, but above all it conveys — with impressive precision and nuance — how we are vectors on the grid of global capital; how difficult it is to even attempt to be an authentic, let alone admirable, human being when we are, first and last, cash flow.”
- David Shields