On his first assignment for a rapacious hedge fund, Gabriel embarks to Bolivia at the end of 2005 to ferret out insider information about the plans of the controversial president-elect. If Gabriel succeeds, he will get a bonus that would make him secure for life. Standing in his way are his headstrong mother, herself a survivor of Pinochet's Chile, and Gabriel's new love interest, the president's passionate press liaison. Caught in a growing web of lies and questioning his own role in profiting from an impoverished people, Gabriel sets in motion a terrifying plan that could cost him the love of all those he holds dear. In the tradition of Martin Amis, Joshua Ferris, and Sam Lipsyte—set against the stunning mountainous backdrop of La Paz and interspersed with Bolivia's sad history of stubborn survival—Peter Mountford examines the critical choices a young man makes as his world closes in on him.
Amazon Exclusive: Garth Stein Reviews A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism
Garth Stein is the author of The Art of Racing in the Rain, Raven Stole the Moon, and How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets.
Peter Mountford’s striking debut novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, is a smart and entertaining book. Set near the peak of the financial bubble in 2005, the book charts the story of a young financial journalist, Gabriel de Boya, recently hired as an analyst for a notoriously unscrupulous hedge fund. Gabriel’s first mission is a test of his abilities: go to Bolivia and find a way to profit from the Bolivian presidential election. In Gabriel, Mountford creates a complex, charismatic, and engaging character, a chameleon who works himself into increasingly precarious positions as his mission is both facilitated and complicated by his love affair with the Bolivian president-elect’s press liaison.
In Mountford's novel, the stakes of international finance and the personal lives of those involved intersect in a beautifully drawn Bolivia. A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism accomplishes that rare trick of being a book of ideas and politics while remaining, at its core, a profoundly intimate, character-driven story and a tremendously good read.
I highly recommend this captivating debut novel by a remarkably promising young writer.
A Note from the Author
In 1983, when I was seven, my family moved from a quiet neighborhood in Washington, D.C., to Sri Lanka. Two weeks after we arrived in Colombo, the country was consumed by a bloody month of ethnic strife—what became known as Black July. That strife turned into a nearly thirty-year-long civil war. Then, in my early twenties, I spent two years in Ecuador writing about the country’s ailing economy. Ecuador was embroiled in a rapid succession of revolutions and spectacular economic catastrophes at the time, and I saw a similar irrepressible current of culture and beauty running beneath these disasters. Also, I saw how inextricably wed finance is to history, and to the lives of everyday people.