Synopsis
Paris, June 1995. In a restaurant, a waiter is violently attacked by a guest. No-one moves. Neither the Russian couple, nor the wife of the aggressor, nor the two young traders come to celebrate their first jobs on the floor. An event not worth lingering over? All actions have consequences. And on this occasion, the brutality, indifference or cowardice of those present will signal the beginning of their individual undoing. From the fall of the Berlin wall to the financial crash of 2008, in a world defined by wealth, the crossed destinies the actors in this first scene, from Russian oligarch to American sub-prime speculator weave a web. At its centre is Sila, the floored immigrant whose refusal to be made a victim will bring the house down.
Praise for “Sila’s Fortune”
“Fabrice Humbert brilliantly weaves their various narratives into a panoramic tapestry of the crazy financial world of the years leading up to the 2008 crash. […]Sila’s Fortune is an epic, complex, extremely readable novel of an era in which the accumulation of great wealth became divorced from the provision of human needs.”
– John Petherbridge, Bookoxygen
