Generation Desperation
On sale
29th January 2026
Price: £20
Genre
Wealth, poverty, and what it means to live a ‘good life’: this is the must-read story for fans of The Trading Game and The Psychology of Money.
‘A fantastically compelling personal story that is also the story of a generation . . . Told with perfect timing.’ – SIMON KUPER
‘Searing insights into the challenges of coming of age in the 21st century . . . an instructive tale about a smart young man looking to grow up in the precariousness of our time.’ – BLOOMBERG
AS FEATURED IN THE SUNDAY TIMES
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AFTER THE RISE, THERE COMES A FALL.
In 2020, Alexander Hurst was 29 years old and broke, living as a writer in a cramped Paris flatshare. There were murmurs that a global pandemic was coming. Financial stability seemed unattainable, so far removed from his reality – the reality of the generation who came of age during the 2008 financial crisis.
On a whim, he poured his meagre savings into highly risky options trading. Within a year this small set of stocks was worth $1.2 million. Enough to turn his life on its head – but not in the way he had imagined, as he began a slow-motion descent into losing it all.
In exploring Alexander’s remarkable rise and fall from wealth, Generation Desperation grapples with the vital questions of our age: what do class and status mean in a late-stage capitalist society? Can everyone really build the life they want? Or is there a cost to pursuing money above everything?
Generation Desperation is an urgent, unmissable fable for our times.
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‘Has an appealing timelessness . . . Hurst weaves the personal and the generational together with seamless ease in a thrilling book.’ – SEB EMINA
‘A riveting, tender, and painfully timely epic about what really matters.’ – ANGELICA FERRARA
‘Clever and brutally honest.’ – LINDSEY TRAMUTA
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Reviews
A fantastically compelling personal story that is also the story of a generation. Hurst captures millennial desperation about money, and the seduction of get-rich-quick stories in the social-media era. Told with perfect timing.
A cautionary tale to young men raised on internet hustle culture, Hurst offers us a silver thread of hope in a moment where masculinity can feel in freefall. A mythic warning about the pitfalls of chasing shiny things. Generation Desperation is a riveting, tender, and painfully timely epic about what really matters.
A clever and brutally honest, Zeitgeisty tale of an ambitious thirty-something trying to make sense of his generation, its hurdles, and what it means to let enough be enough.
This page-turner of a memoir tells a story which could only have happened in the 2020s with all the meme stocks, app-facilitated dates and Covid lockdowns that this implies. But for all its ultra-modernity it has an appealing timelessness to it as well. The 'rags to riches to rags again' story is a classic archetype after all, as are American writers in Paris in search of a different life. Hurst weaves the personal and the generational together with seamless ease in a thrilling book that says a lot about the times we are in.
Searing insights into the challenges of coming of age in the 21st century . . . an instructive tale about a smart young man looking to grow up in the precariousness of our time