Ways and Means: A Novel

Daniel Lefferts

2024 පෙබ · Abrams

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* A Most Anticipated Book of 2024 * Them * Debutiful * Literary Hub * Electric Literature * And Many More! *

A searing debut novel about a striving finance student, the line between ambition and greed, and the disordered politics of our era

“[An] auspicious debut . . . a wildly entertaining drama of ambition and consequence.” —SAM SACKS, Wall Street Journal

“Deadly serious in ambition, wildly entertaining in execution, Ways and Means is a remarkably accomplished debut . . . Every line of this gorgeous novel glows with Lefferts’ intelligence and compassion.” ―ANTHONY MARRA, New York Times bestselling author of Mercury Pictures Presents and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“A work of enormous wit, humor, and passion that captures life in turbo capitalist America with compassion and grace.” ―GARY SHTEYNGART, New York Times bestselling author of Our Country Friends

“Totally absorbing . . . Lefferts delivers The Great Gatsby for the 21st-century: irreverent, sexy, and sharp. A major event.” ―JESSI JEZEWSKA STEVENS, author of The Exhibition of Persephone Q and The Visitors

Alistair McCabe comes to New York with a plan. Young, handsome, intelligent, and gay, he hopes to escape his Rust Belt poverty and give his mother a better life by pursuing a career in high finance.

But by the spring of 2016, Alistair’s plan has come undone: His fantasy banking job has eluded him, he’s mired in student debt, and in his desperation he’s gone to work for an enigmatic billionaire whose ambitions turn out to be far darker than Alistair could have imagined. By the time Alistair uncovers his employer’s secret, his life is in danger and he’s forced to go on the run.

Meanwhile, Alistair’s paramours, an older couple named Mark and Elijah, must face their own moral and financial dilemmas. Mark, nearing the end of his trust fund, takes a job with his father’s mobile-home empire that forces him to confront the unsavory foundations of his family’s wealth, while Elijah, a failed painter, throws in his lot with an artist-provocateur whose latest project transforms the country’s political chaos into a thing of alluring, amoral beauty.

As the nation hurtles toward a breaking point, Alistair, Mark, and Elijah must band together to save one another and themselves.

Propulsive, exuberant, and profoundly observed, Ways and Means is an indelible, clear-eyed investigation of class and ambition, sex and art, and politics and power in twenty-first century America.

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Daniel Lefferts was born in upstate New York and now lives in Hudson, New York. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and has taught writing at Columbia and Rutgers. Ways and Means is his first novel.