Five titles that explore the complexities of the stock market

Samantha Greene Woodruff is the author of Amazon #1 bestseller The Lobotomist’s Wife. She studied history at Wesleyan University and continued her studies at NYU’s Stern School of Business, where she earned an MBA. Woodruff spent nearly two decades working on the business side of media, primarily at Viacom’s Nickelodeon, before leaving corporate life to become a full-time mom. In her newfound “free” time, she took classes at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, where she accidentally found her calling as a historical fiction author. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, Writer’s Digest, Female First, Read 650, and more.

Woodruff's new novel is The Trade Off.

[My Book, The Movie: The Lobotomist's Wife; My Book, The Movie: The Trade Off; Q&A with Samantha Greene Woodruff]

At Lit Hub the author tagged five standout books that explore the complexities of the stock market:

Hernan Diaz, Trust

Probably the most lauded and currently well-known book in my round-up, this Pulitzer Prize winner expertly touches many of the same themes I hope to in The Trade Off. On the surface it is the story of a Wall Street tycoon who foresaw the Great Crash of 1929 and made a fortune from it. (NB: I was already well into writing my new novel when this literary gem came out.)

Cleverly told in four separate fictional texts—a “novel,” an “autobiography,” a “memoir,” and a “diary,” each with a different narrator—Trust takes the classic tale of stock market excess and spins it like a globe, offering the reader a puzzle with an ambiguous solution. It is no surprise that this unexpected tale with an innovative narrative style has appeared on so many “best of” lists.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue