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 Morales's press liaison, Lenka Villarobles, with whom he has fallen in love.
A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism is a look inside the often-misunderstood world of high finance and a thorough going exploration of ambition and class and the cash nexus of the unfettered free-market.
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Advance Praise
Peter Mountford’s striking debut novel 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.
- Garth Stein, author of The Art of Racing in the Rain in a guest author review for Amazon.com
A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism is a terrific debut novel—smart, moving, beautifully written. Peter Mountford's parable of the voracious global economy reminded me of Graham Greene's The Quiet American in its clear-eyed depiction of the realpolitik of our age.
- Jess Walter, author of The Financial Lives of Poets and The Zero
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 characters 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, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead
Peter Mountford, in his amazing debut as a novelist, has updated the gilded myth of Wall Street swashbucklers in expensive suits and spun it out into the world in a hellbent tale, dramatizing the contorted rationalizations practiced by the financial elite to justify their self-delusion. Forget fame, respect, making the world a better place. Transcend the craving for money by acquiring a truckload of it. Buddha as a hedge fund operator, reallocating soullessness throughout the system.
- Bob Shacochis, author of Swimming in the Volcano, and The Next New World
A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism is a brilliant debut novel, one that is generous in giving readers an original cast of vividly-drawn and unforgettable characters, learned in its knowledge of the interwoven worlds of finance and politics, sexy, and thoroughly cosmopolitan. Peter Mountford is easily one of the most gifted and skillful young writers, already accomplished, I have had the pleasure of reading in many years.
- Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage and Dreamer
In his debut novel, A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism, Peter Mountford has something important to say about the ambiguous moral ground where the personal meets the political. He has experience and sophistication beyond his years and is well-positioned to mine this vein. This novel is worth your time and attention.
- David Guterson, author of Snow Falling on Cedars
Peter Mountford’s A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism is a sharp, funny and terrifying novel—in a world so much like our own (part of the terror: it may, in fact, be our world), Gabriel’s actions and the reactions of those around him caused me to wonder, again and again: how do I wish to live in this world, and what latitude might I find?
- Peter Rock, author of My Abandonment