The Hermit explores the world of high-stakes investment banking with a sharp eye for the existential ramifications of this calling. The plot follows the daily routine of Andy Sylvain, a 50-year-old Manhattan bond trader who grows disenchanted with his daily hustle and starts to contemplate a clean break. He's a Master of the Universe whose thoughts and inner rationales betray a lost and confused man who cannot even describe what ails him, much less outline a cure for his malaise. Written in a breezy style, the novel's levity is deceptive: underneath sparkling descriptions of conspicuous consumption, glitzy parties, and the intricacies of trading-floor battles, the reader will find layered meditations on the poignant conflict between the allure of a rational, technocratic world and the longing for a transcendent order of things.
Katerina Grishakova is a writer living on the East Coast. She came to the US from Moscow in 1996 and spent more than a decade working on Wall Street before leaving the financial industry to devote herself to fiction writing.
"This is an extraordinary book, rich in observation and keenly attuned to the inner world of its spiritually impoverished protagonist. The mosaic-like accumulation of physical detail—much attention is paid to food, houses, shoes, and clothes—and the author's deep understanding of and affection for her wryly comic but wholly credible cast of eccentrics cohere over time into a portrait of a troubled psyche that doubles as an indictment of a troubled nation, one consumed with technology and profits, plagued by demagogues and charlatans, and driving at full speed towards something dark. The final fifty pages—an extended sequence that is at once ominous, dream-like, and achingly sad—is some of the finest writing of the year, calling to mind the films of Martin McDonagh and the Coen Brothers. At once cerebral and melancholy, nimbly balancing metaphysics and the mundane, this is a book to be savored. It is an impressive achievement." - Boze Harrington
"A Tom Wolfe for the Instagram age! Katerina Grishakova writes with the assurance of a seasoned novelist even as her pages sing out with the exuberance of a newcomer. The Hermit is a stylish, sophisticated story of how internal turmoil can ravage the soul even as external success can nourish the ego. Ruthless, funny, and dazzlingly sharp-eyed on the details, Grishakova is a thrilling new voice." - Meghan Daum
