Pick of the week

Trust

by Hernan Diaz, Picador, £16.99, ebook £8.99

HHHHH

Hernan Diaz’s second novel isn’t one book, or two, but four in one, and is an intricate investigation on the meaning of truth.

The idea of alternative facts may be relatively new, but alternative narratives, opinions and perspectives are as old as time. Who do we trust to tell us the truth?

Diaz investigates this question with an engrossing tale, told multiple times through multiple voices. First we read Harold Vanner’s novel Bonds, published in 1938 as a thinly veiled novelisation of a man at the centre of the Wall Street Crash. But how far from the truth was this fiction?

Taking up other versions of the tale, Diaz perfects different voices with remarkable agility. The echoes between the tales are deliberate, alerting us to the twisting of truths and the distortions of what was fact and fiction.

What you deem to be the truth depends on who you trust.