The frenetic world of high finance has long seduced novelists flagellating a fiscal theme. Big Business, the Square Mile and Wall Street, with their cocktail of power, money, sex and back-stabbing, epitomise high-octane environments where extremes of behaviour and personality can collide to good fictional effect. From Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and Jay McInerney’s Brightness Falls to (more recently) Polly Courtney’s Golden Handcuffs, the world’s financial centres provide the backdrop for contemporary variants on the morality play, in which greed is wildly glamorous but never good, and where souls are sold for far more than cash. Under Nero, Rome burned; today the City eats itself.

‘I wanted my hero to be young, with pots of money, and no common sense as to how to spend it. What else could he be but a graduate trainee in The City?’ asks Iain Hollingshead, author of Twentysomething, and himself a former investment banking intern. ‘I liked the fact that the life of an investment banker is so intense that it breeds either lots of sex or lots of fights,’ he adds. Harry Bingham, ex-City trader and author of five novels including The Money Makers and Sweet Talking Money, concurs. “I don’t like novels where the plot hinges on violence. The dramatic motivation of money is much more satisfying,” he says.

But although fictional filthy lucre can get financial pulses racing, invariably we only get to see one side of the gilded, high-denominational coin: biting satires, dissecting the glamour and the tawdriness of such a world followed by disillusionment on the part of the hero or heroine who embarks on a journey of self-discovery, growing in empathy, self-respect, and wisdom. Cue the violins. In Going East, by Matthew d’Ancona, strategy consultant heroine Mia finds self-worth and unconditional acceptance from new-age therapists, a record-shop owner, and a drunken down-and-out. In my own novel, Something I’m Not, corporate headhunter Amber must juggle Bill Clinton, the composer Stephen Sondheim, gay vicars, and guilt with attempts to make sense of her long-held decision not to have kids.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP