This short, self-assured novel by Australian-born Jennings (Snake) brilliantly depicts the complicated life of a working woman on Wall Street during the dot-com boom. Cath, a freelance writer in her 40s, is married to Bailey, who's 25 years her senior. When he develops Alzheimer's, she takes a speech-writing job at an investment bank to pay for his expensive medical care. Wry but realistic, and realizing her position in a rigid boys' club hierarchy, she suppresses her liberal sensibility and defers to the chauvinists who dominate the firm, even cozying up to Horace, the company's most Machiavellian executive. Cath's Virgil through this hell is Mike, a cynical but gabby risk manager whose gossip and instruction illuminate the high-stakes office politics and dismal science of Wall Street. As Bailey deteriorates, in scene after heartbreaking scene, Cath finds unexpected succor "in the belly of the beast." Jennings, herself a former Wall Street speechwriter, makes it clear that the mad math of high finance and the delusions of Alzheimer's resemble one another: it's a metaphor she exploits with dramatic consequences in this piercing novel, gleaming with facets of hard-won knowledge, polished by experience and a keen intelligence. An ideal subway read for smart working men and women, it masterfully documents the culture of economic and corporate arrogance, while never losing sight of the human cost of such hubris. National advertising; 6-city author tour. (June) Forecast: This is the second publication from Fourth Estate, a new HarperCollins imprint imported from the U.K. The novel's high quality bodes well for the brand, and readers will find in it an added resonance (and booksellers, perhaps enhanced sales) in the wake of the Enron debacle. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

This is a timely, exquisitely written novel set in the world of high finance during the mid-1990s. Cath has taken a job at the World Trade Center working for an investment bank. She is in need of some serious money to take care of her husband, Bailey, a graphic designer who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. In alternating chapters, Cath describes her daily "commute between two circles of hell." There's her husband's world, which has "turned into one of his collages: swatches of memories, scraps of facts, found fears, discarded desires." Then there's the world of high finance and its tortuous chains of command and stupor-inducing meetings. She does manage to make a friend at work--Mike, head of risk management, who is given to humming Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows" ("Everybody knows the fight was fixed / the poor stay poor, the rich get rich / that's how it goes, everybody knows"). Jennings manages to intertwine the fates of both Bailey and the investment bank in a contemporary morality tale told with caustic wit. Joanne Wilkinson.