A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism

Half Chilean, half Russian, 27-year-old American Gabriel Francisco de Boya has never felt like he belonged anywhere—until he moves to La Paz in 2005, just before the tumultuous election that resulted in Evo Morales becoming Bolivia’s first indigenous president. Covertly working for a notoriously unscrupulous hedge fund, Gabriel poses as a journalist in order to ferret out insider political and financial information so that the fund can generate profit from the country’s political upheaval. His work is made more complicated by a burgeoning love affair with Lenka, the new president's idealistic press liaison, as well as his mother's constant moral presence as a leftist political activist. In Bolivia, where Gabriel lives at the sharpest crossroads of privilege and poverty, his otherwise sensible motivations are tested by extraordinary circumstance. 

In the tradition of Martin Amis, Joshua Ferris and Sam Lipsyte—only set against the stunning mountainous backdrop of La Paz and interspersed with Bolivia’s sad history of stubborn survival—Peter Mountford examines the critical choices a young man makes as his world closes in on him.