Fic­tion

The Trade Off

  • From the Publisher
September 1, 2023

A grip­ping his­tor­i­cal tale of greed, ambi­tion, and fam­i­ly ties from best­selling author Saman­tha Greene Woodruff. In roar­ing 20s Man­hat­tan, Bea Abramovitz is a young Jew­ish woman with a tal­ent for math and an uncan­ny under­stand­ing of the stock mar­ket. Bea dreams of work­ing as a bro­ker on Wall Street and her smarts and tenac­i­ty land her an inter­view at the famous House of Mor­gan, in the new Ladies Depart­ment, a divi­sion cre­at­ed to man­age female clien­tele. What she doesn’t know is that those jobs are reserved for well-to-do girls from soci­ety fam­i­lies, not poor immi­grants from the Low­er East Side. Instead, she is sent to the base­ment, where she gets hired for a cler­i­cal posi­tion in the Wire Depart­ment. She yearns to put her uncan­ny stock-pick­ing skills to bet­ter use, but the male-dom­i­nat­ed world of Wall Street won’t accept her. When her twin broth­er Jake returns home after los­ing every­thing in a Ponzi scheme out west, Bea sees her oppor­tu­ni­ty: he’ll get the job on Wall Street, and she’ll pick the stocks. With Bea’s help, Jake’s star swift­ly ris­es at Nation­al City Bank. As the decade draws to a close, every­one else is cel­e­brat­ing the country’s new state of per­ma­nent pros­per­i­ty” but Bea sees signs of a crash loom­ing. Will she be able to con­vince her broth­er, or any­one else, that what she’s see­ing is real in time to save her fam­i­ly before it is too late?

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