Vika Stakhanova’s path to the Wall Street elite was not paved for her. Orphaned as a teenager during the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vika sets out for the Darwinian dreamscape that exists only in America. When the market crashes, she is poised to rake in cash off the back of the Great Recession. But her lavish life leaves her rotting from the inside and she finds herself at a moral crossroad: stay and accept her depravity or walk away from the table.

The American Spellbound is a story of greed, politics and the illusions that allow us to get through the day, based on Katya G. Cohen’s decade in the high-stakes, fast-paced, blindly gluttonous financial industry. Coldly insightful, yet deeply personal, Cohen shares her rare gift in this debut, granting us an inside view of the collapse from the offices of those cashing in on it and a gripping vision of the devastating moment when one wakes up from the American Dream.