Ask a Bookseller: ‘The Wealth of Shadows’ by Graham Moore

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now. 

Lovers of little-known history, get ready: We’ve got a book that lifts a real-life Minnesota tax attorney out of WWII obscurity and into the limelight with an out-of-the-box plan to defeat the Nazis without ever going to war.

The book is Graham Moore’s meticulously researched novel, “The Wealth of Shadows,” and Rona Brinlee of The BookMark in Neptune Beach, Fla., says it was one of her favorite books of this past year.

In 1939, horrified by what the build-up of what will become WWII, Ansel Luxford goes to the U.S. Treasury Department with a proposal to bankrupt Germany while still appearing neutral on the world stage. They form a committee and start making plans for the future of the dollar; meanwhile, a potential Soviet spy has infiltrated the system.

Battle-by-economic-theory might sound dry, but bookseller Brinlee assures readers that it’s very readable, with fascinating characters, including well-known economist John Maynard Keynes. At the end of the book, the author reveals his research and clarifies the places where he inserted fiction, but much of it is true.

“There’s a lot of there’s some economic theory in there,” says Brinlee. “Because John Maynard Keynes proposes things that are based on the [value of the] dollar and how that would work. And I’m not an economist, and so I have to confess, I read those parts twice, but that was okay. I learned a lot, and I was more than happy to do that.”