Former bond trader Alex Preston’s quietly ambitious debut, This Bleeding City, tackles the recent financial crisis from an insider’s perspective. His novel follows the fortunes of a group of university friends who are lured into working in the City by the big bonuses on offer. Like his narrator Charlie Wales (a nod to Scott Fitzgerald, that great chronicler of boom and bust), a trader in a Mayfair hedge fund, Preston was at the heart of it all when the markets crashed.

Subscribe or Sign In to read the full article