Fool's Gold — A Novel (Part One: The Rise)

A novel about beauty, money, and the silence between Cuban fathers and their daughters.

Sofia Castillo is twenty-six, six feet tall, and has been working since she was sixteen. Her face has been on the side of a building in West Hollywood. Her father, Raúl, came from Havana on a wooden boat in 1980 and built three restaurants from nothing.

In December 2023, at a rooftop shoot in South Beach, Sofia meets a crypto influencer named Damian Voigt. By January she has put $40,000 into a memecoin called $FLAMINGO. By the end of the month it is worth $412,000. She does not sell.

By summer she has lost $1.2 million. $380,000 of it was not hers to lose. It was her father's.

This is the novel of what happened. And what came after.

About the book

Fool's Gold is a contemporary literary novel in three parts. This edition contains Part One — The Rise — Chapters One through Four, set between December 2023 and February 2024. Part Two and Part Three are forthcoming.

The story is set in the world of 2024 memecoins, but the book is about something older. It is about what happens to a woman whose entire identity was given to her by other people, on the day the contract that built that identity finally breaks. It is about beauty as inheritance and trap. About the slow, unspectacular work of becoming a person after the costume comes off.

For readers of Jenny Offill, Ottessa Moshfegh, Patricia Lockwood, Brandon Taylor, Anna Wiener, and Hernan Diaz.

What you receive

A literary novel of eighty-three pages, delivered as a single archive containing the book in two formats. PDF for reading on phones, tablets, computers, and for printing. EPUB for Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books, and Kindle via Amazon's Send to Kindle service. A short reading guide is included.

A note from the author

Sofia Castillo, the protagonist of this book, is not a real person. Neither is her father, her sister, her boyfriend, the coin, the chat, or the Bloomberg piece. The Faena Hotel exists. The Mariel boatlift happened. The rest is the work of imagination. No real cryptocurrency, exchange, brand, or public figure is portrayed in this work.