A History of Money

A major new novel from the writer Roberto Bolaño called “one of the best living Latin American writers.”

Alan Pauls, one of Latin American literature’s rising stars, combines the intimate and the political in a novel that, although it is set in Argentina in the 1970s and ’80s, will bring to mind books like Choire Sicha’s and Sam Lipsyte’s in its subtle, brilliant depiction of the place of money in its protagonists’ lives.

It begins with a body: a top executive of an iron and steel company dies after his helicopter, traveling toward the factory where he is due to meet with striking workers, plummets into the river. The briefcase full of money which he was carrying disappears without a trace. Accident, or assassination? And where is the money?

A History of Money

And his individual story is echoed in the larger story of Argentina in the 1970s and ’80s, where money is everything: promise and punishment, dream and disaster. An intensely evocative novel from one of the world’s most exciting new writers.