The Way We Live Now is a complex and compulsive tale that traces the career of Augustus Melmotte, a strange and mysterious financier who bursts into London society like a guided missile. In setting up a dubious scheme based on speculative money and stock market gambles, Melmotte manages to lure in several members of the English aristocracy, for whom money is the summum bonum. The world is at his feet, until the corruption catches up with him. Considered one of Trollope’s greatest works, The Way We Live Now leaves the listener questioning whether much has changed in the last century, or whether this is, after all, the way we live now.