The Cattle Express: A Tale of Wall Street and Siberia

by Tom Crosshill

In this stunning international bestseller, award-winning author Tom Crosshill takes a hard look at the human cost of Wall Street through the eyes of a man whose family survived the brutal Soviet occupation of the Baltic states in the forties.

Twenty-one year old Peter Ostberg has two Make piles of money on Wall Street and publish the comic he is writing in his spare time about his grandmother’s tragic exile to Siberia during World War 2. When he is chosen for a position at storied Wall Street firm Arnis Brothers, his first dream comes true.

When Peter’s Wall Street dream turns into a nightmare, he finds that his comic isn’t so much his dream as his refuge.

Siberia and Wall Street. For Peter the two become linked in important and moving ways. The Cattle Express outlines Peter’s personal journey, a journey that illustrates the inhumanity of Wall Street in the most personal—and surprising—of ways.

"Tom Crosshill is a major new writer with a powerful vision."
New York Times best-selling author David Farland

408 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 7, 2016

About the author

Tom Crosshill's fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award (thrice) as well as the Latvian Annual Literature Award. His stories have appeared in venues such as Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Lightspeed. In 2009, he won the Writers of the Future contest. After some years spent in Oregon and New York, he currently lives in his native Latvia. In the past, he has operated a nuclear reactor, translated books and worked in a zinc mine, among other things.

Tom's young adult novel "The Cat King of Havana" is forthcoming from Katherine Tegen Books (HarperCollins) in 2016.

Reviews

[Dror Guldin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Latvia half was much better than the WALL Street half, but the latter was also enjoyable

[Coenraad Groenewald · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bought and read this as part of my goal to read at least one book from every country I visit. So this was my choice for Latvia after an amazing long weekend in Riga. But maybe Tom is no longer Latvian enough, and the story too much about stock trading and New York to satisfy my goal. But the perspective is Latvian and the memories (even though second hand) of Siberia raw and thought provoking.