On the Floor
A Novel
-
-
4.0 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
"The smartest financial novel since The Bonfire of the Vanities, and the first with a fully drawn female heroine."—Frank Partnoy, bestselling author of F.I.A.S.C.O.: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader and Wait: The Art and Science of Delay
Longlisted for the Orange Prize
A hard-living investment banker has three days to decide her destiny in this thrilling novel.
It has been 182 days of vodka and insomnia since Geri Molloy got dumped. A twenty-eight-year-old investment banker with a rare knack for numbers, Geri counts the days since her breakup with the same determination that has made her serious capital on her firm's London trading floor. But it is January of 1991, and war in the Middle East is about to shake up the markets—and maybe also change the course of her career.
The firm's biggest client is Felix Mann, a reclusive hedge fund manager in Hong Kong, who will only talk to Geri. But Geri is being pushed to her breaking point, and several rivals are hungry for a seat at the table. When she finds herself caught up in a high-stakes takeover, Felix is game for the power play—but his price tag is Geri's future.
At once fiercely intelligent and utterly gripping, Aifric Campbell's On the Floor is a sharp-edged story about love and money, the cruel appraisals we make of one another, and what it really means for a woman to take control of her life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This 2012 Orange Prize nominee from Campbell (Loss Adjustor), a former managing director at Morgan Stanley, punctures the seamy darkness of banking with acute observations of being "the skirt amongst men." A gift for math helped Geri Molloy trade her meager Irish beginnings for a top trader post in the early '90s at British investment banking firm Steiner, where she mistrusts but uses her male coworkers and boss. Beholden to aggressive client Felix Mann, Geri goes to Hong Kong and suffers through local delicacies like turtle blood in order to secure his business. For her boss, she gathers intelligence on one of Felix's more volatile investments. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, as Geri's office braces for record profits, she loses her taste for the big ticket. The excesses enjoyed by Steiner's traders mask a desperate need for success that will resonate with readers, and the office's brutal gender politics which leads her to compose a cutting "Rule Book for Wannabe Female Bankers" predominates over Geri's more sentimental moments, such as when she lies in bed with a bottle of vodka instead of the boyfriend who thrived after leaving her. Though an open-ended resolution may frustrate some, Geri's self-aware reenactment of Wall Street (a film the traders see as a "reconfirmation that greed is good and lunch is for wimps") is a heart-pounding ride.
