Book Review: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

"This book is a self-help book. Its objective, as it says on the cover, is to show you how to get filthy rich in rising Asia. And to do that it has to find you, huddled, shivering, on the packed earth under your mother's cot one cold, dewy morning."

This unconventional narrative opens the new novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. The unnamed main character struggles to rise from a childhood of crushing poverty in his unnamed Middle Eastern country, through various questionable money-making schemes, levels of bureaucratic corruption and often violent business rivals, to become one of the wealthiest men in Asia. At the same time he attempts to build a family life, feeling his wife drift away from him and trying to hold on to his son, all the while nursing an old crush on a woman from his childhood city, who has her own struggle for financial security in a tumultuous society. At times tragic, hilarious, and profane, the novel ends with a heartfelt realization about what really makes life worth living. - Michelle (Sunset)