Also of interest...in banking and other suspect pursuits

A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism

by Peter Mountford

(Mariner, $16)

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Peter Mountford’s “very funny” debut novel is a welcome addition to “what could be called banker lit,” said Jessica Loudis in NPR.org. Its “overeducated anti-hero” is a young hedge-fund analyst sent by his New York bosses to spy on Bolivia’s political regime. The ethical challenges of his work multiply when he falls in love with the president’s press secretary. Then again, the whole story is a “quasi-Faustian fable” about the process of moral alienation—except “with less gravitas and more pisco sours.”

Money and Power

by William D. Cohan

(Doubleday, $30.50)

Those hungering for a guide to what life is really like behind the doors of an investment bank could do worse than this “exhaustive, revelatory account of the rise and rise of Goldman Sachs,” said John Gapper in the Financial Times. Often “engrossing,” William Cohan’s book suffers from the fact that, despite the “vast trove of material” he’s amassed on Goldman, he fails to provide “a coherent conclusion.” Even so, Money and Power is the “most penetrating” attempt to tell the bank’s story so far.

Other People’s Money

by Justin Cartwright

(Bloomsbury, $15)

Justin Cartwright’s latest novel is “a modest, gentle work of genius,” said Viv Groskop in the London Observer. Set in the City of London, it follows the disastrous attempts of the chairman of an “aristocratic, family-owned” bank to cook the books of the centuries-old institution until it can be sold off. As “enjoyable as it is intelligent,” Cartwright’s tale is not only a “masterpiece of a comic novel.” It also can serve as a “handy idiot’s guide to the financial crisis.”

A Week in December

by Sebastian Faulks

(Random House, $15)

Sebastian Faulks’s “ambitious, entertaining, and often scathingly angry” financial-crisis satire, which is just out in paperback, can be “oddly muddled” at times, said Gregory Cowles in The New York Times. There’s “good anti-bourgeois fun” to be had here, but it’s difficult to take seriously the novel’s cartoonish depiction of a devious banker. Especially when you only have to turn the page to find a young jihadist bomber depicted as a “confused kid eager to fit in.”