Millionaire

Janet Gleeson chronicles the audacious rise of John Law, a Scottish-born gambler and financial theorist whose radical vision for paper currency and state banking transformed early 18th-century France. Rejected by English monarchs who had little patience for a convicted duelist, Law found a more receptive audience in the debt-ridden court of Louis XV, where he engineered a speculative frenzy so vast it required a new word to describe the fortunes being made. Gleeson traces how one man's genius and recklessness reshaped European finance and planted the seeds of its own destruction.

Esther Wane narrates with a composed, measured authority that keeps the dense financial history accessible without flattening its drama. Her pacing draws out the tension between Law's genuine brilliance and his spectacular blind spots, and the spoken format suits Gleeson's narrative style well, carrying readers through court intrigue and economic collapse with the propulsive energy of a thriller. The result is a biography that rewards listeners who enjoy history told at the intersection of ideas and personality.