How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

The latest novel from Mohsin Hamid, author of the masterful Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is less an exercise in storytelling and more a lesson in controlled biting satire. Constructed as a self-help book, if you read all the chapter titles closely, there are no surprises to be had - only a ringing powerhouse of truth about the nature of money, ambition and the economy in 'rising Asia'.

Each chapter makes a declaration about getting rich: 'have an exit strategy', 'learn from a master'. Each chapter is about you. Because this a self-help novel after all. You are born in a small village. You will go on to be a corporate tycoon with the world at his feet. This book will show you how to get there. It is funny and pertinent and about now. There's some simple and deceptive in Hamid's prose, an everyman attitude towards the mechanics of storytelling. In effect, the book is cleverer than you think because you think it's just a satirical self-help book about the economy and the rise of Asia as economic superpowers. Actually, there's a sombre delicate love-story to be told. There is also the harnessing of the everyman, the 'you' of the story, the 'you' who can go on to be as rich as the narrator.

There is a delicious delirious quality to this book in that it jumps off the page, pounds away towards an inevitable conclusion and sums up the verve, energy and electricity to pound away at the very rotten core of ambition and self-actualisation. This is a delight.