"A fast-paced economic thriller that exposes the financial deal making behind the mergers and acquisitions boom of the 1980s"--Publisher's web site.

Set in the teetering financial world of the 1980s, Junk is a fast-paced thriller that tells the story of Robert Merkin, resident genius of the upstart investment firm Sacker Lowell. Merkin has been hailed as "America's Alchemist," and his proclamation that "debt is an asset" has propelled him to a dizzying level of success. By orchestrating the takeover of a massive steel manufacturer, Merkin intends to do the "deal of the decade," the one that will rewrite all the rules. Ayad Akhtar is working on his broadest canvas to date as he chronicles the lives of men and women engaged in financial civil war: insatiable investors, threatened workers, killer lawyers, skeptical journalists, and ambitious federal prosecutors. Although Junk is set forty years in the past, this is a play about the world we live in right now, a world in which money has become the only thing of real value. -- from back cover.