'How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia', by Mohsin Hamid – review

In the classic rags-to-riches narrative, a boy born into poverty attains respectability by dint of hard work, clean living and moral courage. Mohsin Hamid’s third novel — his eagerly awaited follow-up to The Reluctant Fundamentalist — updates the genre for the 21st century, transplanting it to ‘rising Asia’ but stripping it of all sense of uplift.

We first encounter Hamid’s unnamed protagonist in his filthy village compound, ‘huddled, shivering on the packed earth’, wracked by hepatitis E. His father, a cook with a ‘voracious sexual appetite’, soon moves the family to the city (‘the first step to getting filthy rich in rising Asia’), where our hero lives in equally squalid conditions but does acquire the vital ‘second step’ of an education.