Luxury has been, in many periods of history, defined by ostentation. In today’s world of hyper-visibility, however, privacy has become the ultimate luxury. And like all luxuries, it’s for sale. For the ultra-wealthy, privacy can involve not only confidentiality and concealment but also outright seclusion. Private islands, remote ranches, bunkers, superyachts and wealth managed so discreetly it is invisible to public scrutiny are all part of a growing economy built around keeping the day-to-day lives of the world’s elites out of the headlines. Even the desire to belong, which seems untangleable from visibility, can be sated quietly, through exclusive communities, members-only clubs and networks all but invisible to outsiders.
Our selection of novels, essays, investigative works and books on design explores wealth and the privacy it affords from several very different perspectives: Wall Street in the 1920s, Silicon Valley’s new Gilded Age, philanthropy among the very wealthy, the desire to belong and the many forms of evasion, whether of public scrutiny or tax obligations. Taken together, these books suggest that true wealth isn’t measured by what it displays, but by what it manages to hide.
Titles about wealth, privacy and disappearing
‘Off the Grid: Houses for Escape Across North America’ by Dominic Bradbury
‘The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich’ by Evan Osnos
‘Such Sheltered Lives’ by Alyssa Sheinmel
‘Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West’ by Justin Farrell
‘Birnam Wood’ by Eleanor Catton
‘Modern West’ by Chase Reynolds Ewald
‘Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness’ by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
‘Off the Grid: Houses for Escape Across North America’ by Dominic Bradbury
For those with the means to turn disconnecting into a design choice, Bradbury surveys architect-fashioned retreats across North America, from secluded forest homes to remote coastal escapes. His selections illustrate how privacy, distance and self-sufficiency can become luxuries in their own right.
‘Off the Grid: Houses for Escape Across North America’ by Dominic Bradbury.
Thames & Hudson
‘The Club’ by Ellery Lloyd
In this novel, the Home Group is a glamorous collection of members-only clubs around the world where the rich and famous party before retreating to five-star suites, far from the prying eyes of fans and the media. Its most spectacular property is Island Home, a closely guarded, ultraluxurious private island resort off the English coast. Here, exclusivity and seclusion offer the ultimate luxury: a place where the wealthy can disappear from public view, until the secrets they hoped to keep hidden begin to surface.
‘The Club’ by Ellery Lloyd.
Harper Collins
‘Trust’ by Hernan Diaz
This novel explores a theme rarely addressed so directly in American fiction: money itself, the accumulation of wealth and the stories that surround it. The book unfolds as a literary puzzle centered on a Wall Street financier in 1920s New York and his wife. Their immense fortune allows them to preserve a private life largely out of public view, leaving their story to be pieced together through different voices that contradict, correct and complement one another. Privacy, power and wealth are closely connected, with truth itself simply another asset to manage.
‘Trust’ by Hernán Díaz.
Riverhead Books
‘The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich’ by Evan Osnos
These essays take readers inside the world of America’s ultra-ultra-rich, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, revealing their obsessions, habits and excesses. Superyachts, luxury bunkers, tax avoidance, private parties and a flood of political donations into Washington fill its pages, making the book read like an episode of Succession or The White Lotus, except that nothing here is fictional. These examples show how extreme wealth can buy privacy, distance and the ability to retreat from ordinary public life. Osnos documents with sharp irony the ambition and extraordinary influence of the new Gilded Age.
‘The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich’ by Evan Osnos.
Scribner
‘Sanctuary’ by James Cleary
In this post-apocalyptic thriller, climate disasters have crippled the United States, leaving half the country underwater and the other half a dust bowl. Billionaire John Brandt has anticipated the collapse and used a mix of money, power and influence to prepare for it. When society begins to unravel, Brandt, his family and his security team retreat to Sanctuary, a vast underground luxury mansion beneath the Nebraskan Great Plains. The novel takes the idea of the wealthy disconnecting to its extreme, imagining a world in which immense fortune can buy a private refuge from catastrophe.
‘Sanctuary’ by James Cleary.
Berkley
‘Such Sheltered Lives’ by Alyssa Sheinmel
This psychological suspense novel is set at Rush’s Recovery, a treatment center on Shelter Island where ultra-high-net-worth clients are promised the utmost discretion. Away from prying eyes and paparazzi, guests stay in private cottages and receive highly personalized care, from daily therapy and acupuncture to a live-in chef and 24/7 personal support. But when a mysterious death threatens to expose the center’s secrets, the very privacy the wealthy have paid to protect begins to unravel. Here, money buys not only treatment and comfort, but seclusion, anonymity and distance from public scrutiny, for better or for worse.
‘Such Sheltered Lives’ by Alyssa Sheinmel.
Atria Emily Bestler Books
‘Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West’ by Justin Farrell
The American West appears here not simply as a spectacular landscape, but as a new geography of power. Farrell spent five years in Teton County, Wyoming, the wealthiest county in the U.S., interviewing hundreds of people, from tech CEOs, Wall Street financiers and oil industry executives to local residents who live alongside the ultra-rich and are often employed by them. The result is a portrait of a region being transformed by extreme wealth, where billionaires can find privacy, distance and the possibility of retreating from ordinary public life.
‘Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West’ by Justin Farrell.
Princeton University Press
‘Birnam Wood’ by Eleanor Catton
In this novel, a landslide leaves a large farm in rural New Zealand abandoned, creating an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an unregulated guerrilla gardening collective. But American billionaire Robert Lemoine has already bought the farm, supposedly to build a doomsday bunker. Catton turns their uneasy relationship into a psychological thriller about ecology, surveillance and property. For Lemoine, extreme wealth makes the desire for survival literal, allowing him to buy remoteness, privacy and a potential refuge from the outside world.
‘Birnam Wood’ by Eleanor Catton.
Picador Paper Birnam Wood
‘Modern West’ by Chase Reynolds Ewald
Featuring photographs by Audrey Hall, this coffee table book offers a look inside 15 contemporary homes in striking locations across the American West, including Park City, Big Sky, Jackson, West Yellowstone, Sun Valley and Santa Fe. Located near ski slopes or overlooking lakes and mountains, the houses combine modern architecture and materials with traditional Western decor while maintaining a close connection to their surroundings. Set apart from dense urban life, these private retreats show how space, seclusion and access to extraordinary landscapes can themselves become markers of privilege.
‘Modern West’ by Chase Reynolds Ewald.
Gibbs Smith
‘Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness’ by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
This deeply researched biography traces the extraordinary life of Howard Hughes, who was orphaned a millionaire at 18 and went on to become a movie producer, aviation record holder, owner of Trans World Airlines and one of the most powerful businessmen in America. But Hughes was as famous for his secrecy and reclusiveness as for his fortune and flamboyant lifestyle. As his wealth grew, it also gave him the extraordinary ability to withdraw from public view, making privacy and seclusion part of the mythology that surrounded his life.
‘Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness’ by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele.
W. W. Norton & Company
