Ghosts of Manhattan
“Mix together Charles
Dickens, Theodore Dreiser, and Tom Wolfe and you get novelist Doug Brunt and
his modern day financier character, Nick Farmer. Faust would have a feast with
so many of the people populating Farmer’s world—and you will have a literary
feast devouring this book.”
Steve Forbes, chairman, Forbes Media
This wryly comic, first-person fiction debut offers a withering view of life on Wall Street from the perspective of an unhappy insider who is too hooked on the money to find a way out, even as his career is ruining his marriage and corroding his soul.
It's 2005. Nick Farmer is a thirty-five-year-old bond trader with Bear Stearns clearing seven-figures each year. The novelty of a work-related night life centering on liquor, hookers, and cocaine has long since worn thin, but Nick remains keenly addicted to his annual bonus. But the lifestyle is taking a toll on his marriage—and on him.
When a nerdy analyst approaches him with apocalyptic prognostications of where Bear's high-flying mortgage-backed securities trading may lead, Nick is presented with the kind of ethical dilemma he's spent a lifetime avoiding. Throw in a hot financial journalist who seems to be more interested in him than in the percolating financial Armageddon—and the prospect that his own wife may have found a new romantic interest of her own—and you have the recipe for Nick's personal and professional implosion.
By turns hilarious and harrowing, Ghosts of Manhattan takes listeners into the rarified world of a winning but flawed character as he struggles to find the right path in a complicated urban heart of darkness.
Praise