Alice™: The biggest untold story in the history of money (Stuart Kells, MUP)

An Australian inventor patented the future of world finance. An Australian journalist saw what finance had become and told the world. Business and finance writer Stuart Kells (The Library: A catalogue of wonders) tells these unbelievable and intertwined tales in Alice™: The biggest untold story in the history of money. That title is a big call. And Alice™ delivers. The world of finance is complicated and impenetrable to most of us who aren’t insiders. Books like The Big Short, The Smartest Guys in the Room, or The Antisocial Network (from which the movie Dumb Money was adapted) have given readers a platform to understand this world from the outside. Alice™ lands perfectly on the tail of these books. Rather than adding to these well-known stories, however, Alice™ turns out to encompass and supersede them all. ‘Alice’ was the name that Australian businessperson/inventor Ian Shepherd gave to his patented new platform of finance, but the book is also about the power of money worldwide, told in the small stories of the average people who’ve got it. That two Australians are at its heart makes this book a must-read, particularly after Kate Jennings’s passing in 2021. The story feels too outlandish to be true, but Alice™ might make you rethink the world you live in, and make you feel smarter… and maybe even unstoppable.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Becca Whitehead is a features and content writer based in Naarm-Melbourne. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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