A Death in Cornwall

Content Warning: This section mentions the Holocaust.

In A Death in Cornwall, Silva highlights how socioeconomic stratification impacts people’s lives. The wealthiest people in the world, the billionaires, live very different lives than even the upper and middle classes. Silva introduces this theme at the very beginning of the book, in the epigraph from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “The Rich Boy”: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me” (1). Exceptionally wealthy characters include the clients of Harris Weber and Anna Rolfe. The upper-class characters include Gabriel and Ingrid. Silva also includes the character Amadou Kamara, who is poor, to examine the hierarchies of wealth.

Within Silva’s fictional world, the wealthiest people are often the least ethical. Silva repeats the line “The richest of the rich, the worst of the worst” to describe the 0.1% (273, 385). People in this category include the clients of the law firm Harris Weber, which creates shell companies to allow wealthy people to make money without paying taxes. The list of Harris Weber clients includes “the leader of a Mexican drug cartel” (279), “the billionaire daughter of Angola’s former dictator” (279), and “Valentin Federov, the billionaire investor” (280).