Mergers and Acquisitions

by Dana Vachon Narrated by Kirby Heyborne

Overview

A stylish and hilarious novel about the lives and loves of well-to-do young Manhattanites in their first year on Wall Street, destined to become one of the year's most buzzed-about debuts.

Mergers & Acquisitions is the story of Tommy Quinn, a recent Georgetown grad who has just landed the job of his dreams as an investment banker at J. S. Spenser, and the perfect girl, Frances Sloan, the daughter of one of New York's oldest moneyed families. As he travels from the most exclusive ball rooms of the Racquet and Tennis Club to the stuffiest boardrooms of J. S. Spenser, from the golf links of Piping Rock to the bedrooms of Park Avenue, and from the debauched yacht of a Mexican billionaire to the Ritalin-strewn prep-school dorm room of his younger brother, he finds that the job and the girl are not what they once seemed.

Sharply written, fast-paced, and bitingly witty, Mergers & acquisitions is a compulsively readable story of Manhattan's young, ambitious, and wealthy. Set against the backdrop of money, lust, power, corruption, cynicism, energy, and excitement that is Wall Street, it is suffused with an authenticity that only an author who lives in that world can provide. A former investment banker at J. P. Morgan, Vachon offers an insider's point of view on the financial scene, and he knows the moneyed turf of Manhattan inside out.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times

A fizzy first novel of investment banker high jinks.

Blackbook

Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney meet Scott Fitzgerald and P.J. O'Rourke... [in this] coruscating, veil-piercing portrait of the American ruling class.

People

A funny romp.

Blueprint

Funny and pointed... Vachon captures the little moments of truth that the young and rich are too busy BlackBerrying to notice.

New York

Like Bright Lights, Big City and The Devil Wears Prada, M&A is a fictionalized account of the moral hazards of high-status Manhattan professional life.

Bloomberg News

Mergers & Acquisitions deserves to be a hit...nobody involved in finance should miss it.

Financial Times

Wickedly funny and smartly written...Enormously entertaining and revelatory. And, like the best first novels, it holds the promise of much greater things to come.

Washington Post

[A] smart, satisfying roman à clef ...The story is fast-paced, and his overblown characters are wildly engaging.

New York Daily News

M&A is a fictionalized account of the underbelly of New York's financial world.

Publishers Weekly

Vachon's debut novel, the subject of frenzied speculation and assiduous hype, arrives on audiobook at the crest of a wave of excitement. Heyborne reads Vachon's brand-name, corporate-name-heavy prose with satisfaction, pounding on each punch line and luxury brand with panache. While it is jarring to hear him mispronounce the names of high-profile New York law firms, undercutting Vachon's brand of masters-of-the-universe realism, Heyborne captures the novel's mixture of high-stakes capital and comic psychological insight. Heyborne's voice, soft and often pleading, is the precise opposite of the rapacious hypercapitalists the book drizzles across its pages, but the juxtaposition works for the most part. Vachon documents, rather than celebrates, the world of finance his book inhabits, and Heyborne's reading further dilutes any sense of romance that might still cling to its Gordon Gekko manqués, chasing after that ever-elusive dollar. Simultaneous release with the Riverhead hardcover (Reviews, Jan. 8). (Apr.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Library Journal

Tommy Quinn, a recent Georgetown graduate with family connections, lands a job with the prestigious New York investment banking firm J.S. Spenser. He quickly finds himself out of his depth but is loath to fail and lose his perks. Soon, everything unravels, and low satire turns to high farce. Tommy makes major mistakes at work and watches helplessly as his hard-working, Red Bull-drinking colleague goes into cardiac arrest trying to get him out of the mess. He falls into sweet, gentle love with the stunningly beautiful Frances, daughter of a prominent New York family, who devolves into a wrist-cutting depressive. Home videos of the whip-snapping sexual escapades of his amoral buddy, Roger, are viewed by thousands when incorporated into a media art installation at a MoMA exhibition party. In a last-ditch effort to protect his standing at the firm, he aligns himself with the easier-going South American branch, but this proves epically disastrous when leftist terrorists scale a private yacht and kidnap his new boss. This yuppie debut novel, written while Vachon was himself an analyst at J.P. Morgan, is an over-the-top Bright Lights, Big Citycoming-of-age story for the 21st century. Recommended for large fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ12/06.]
—Sheila Riley

DEC 07/JAN 08 - AudioFile

Tommy Quinn is out of place. He is a young, not so ambitious man starting out in the financial world who is surrounded by wealthy and oblivious people, from his bosses to his circle of acquaintances. He tells his story through a wonderfully written first-person account in this debut novel. It succeeds as a poignant, often hilarious coming-of-age story. Narrator Kirby Heyborne crafts perfectly appropriate voices for the characters, including a benevolent and gregarious Indian man, a Latin boss, air-headed men and women, and a sad girlfriend. The best characterization, though, is given to an especially shallow friend, whose dialogue keeps the reader chuckling. Long live hedonism and laugh-out-loud writing. Vachon is here to stay. Let's hope he and Heyborne team up again. M.B. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171874544
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	04/05/2007
Edition description:	Unabridged

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