Mohsin Hamid is the author of the international bestsellers Exit West and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both finalists for the Man Booker Prize. His first novel, Moth Smoke, won the Betty Trask Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award. His essays, a number of them collected as Discontent and Its Civilizations, have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in Lahore, Pakistan.
“A showcase for its author’s audacious talents… both an affecting
and highly specific tale of love and ambition, and a larger
metaphorical look at the startling social and economic changes that
are … changing the lives of millions” -- Michiko Kakutani, in her
“10 Favorite Books of 2013,” The New York Times
A Foreign Policy Leading Global Thinker
Shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature
Named a Best or Notable Book of 2013 by The New York
Times, National Public Radio, The Chicago Tribune, Vogue,
Apple, The Observer (London), The Sunday Times (London),
Financial Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Huffington
Post, Kansas City Star, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Book Page,
Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews
A Vogue "Favorite Novelist"
“It is a measure of Mr. Hamid’s audacious talents that he manages
to make his protagonist’s story work on so many levels. ‘You’ is,
at once, a modern-day Horatio Alger, representing the desires and
frustrations of millions in rising Asia; a bildungsroman hero, by
turns knavish and recognizably human, who sallies forth from the
provinces to find his destiny; and a nameless but intimately known
soul, whose bittersweet romance with the pretty girl possesses a
remarkable emotional power. With How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising
Asia Mr. Hamid reaffirms his place as one of his generation’s most
inventive and gifted writers.” –Michiko Kakutani, The New York
Times
“Thanks to Hamid's meticulous use of detail—and his sympathy for a
man on the make in a society of endemic poverty—we engage deeply
with a serious character whose essence remains his own yet who
stands as a figure representative of his time and place, an effect
only the best novelists can create… This tale of an unscrupulous
striver may bring to mind a globalized version of The Great Gatsby.
Given the unabashed gimmickry of Hamid's how-to design, it's a
pleasant surprise to find that his book is nearly that good.” –Alan
Cheuse, NPR
"A love story and bildungsroman disguised as a self-help book, and
the result has all the inventiveness, exuberance and pathos that
the writer's fans have come to expect… Marvelous and moving."
–TIME Magazine
“Extraordinarily clever… Hamid has taken the most American form of
literature—the self-help book—and transformed it to tell… a
surprisingly moving story.” –Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“The marriage of… two curiously compatible genres—self-help and the
old-fashioned bildungroman—is just one of the pleasures of Mohsin
Hamid’s shrewd and slippery new novel, a rags-to-rishes story that
works on a head-splitting number of levels. It’s a love story and a
study of seismic social change. It parodies a get-rich-quick book
and gestures to a new direction for the novel, all in prose so pure
and purposeful it pases straight through into the bloodstream. It
intoxicates.” –Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review
“Wonderfully astringent… Hamid is a sly witness to a traditional
culture’s dizzying trajectory—supermodels stalk city billboards; a
drone hovers ominously in the sky—but his satiric impulse gives way
to compassion for the intimacies that keep us tethered in a rapidly
changing world.” –Vogue
“This is one of those original works that are also resonant as a
record of human experience and geo-political shift, and a strong
argument for Hamid as one of the most important writers working
today. An enjoyable read no matter who ‘you’ are.” –The Daily
Beast
"Relentlessly brilliant… Hamid is a master stylist, and his third
novel is, I think, his best thus far… There is something so rich
and so deeply authentic in [the protagonist’s] romance that its
rendering alone hooks the reader… the novel ends with one of the
most stunning final sentences I’ve read in contemporary fiction, a
sentence that no review will ever quote, but an indelible sentence,
which will live in your heart, mind, and soul long after you read
it." –The Los Angeles Review of Books
"Dazzling… an addictive, muscular piece of storytelling… [How To
Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia] shows a writer at the height of his
powers, with a hell of a story to tell… a tremendous novel: tender,
sharp and formally daring, a portal into a fast-moving, vividly
realised world." –The Guardian
"Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel boasts a startlingly distinctive voice
as commanding and unadorned as its title." –Pico Iyer, The New York
Times Book Review
"Hamid exercises perfect control as he spins the life story of one
man's struggle with turbulent times and economics in his unnamed
Asian city. It's an impressive feat that he reveals this life,
infancy to death, in a little more than 200 pages. That he achieves
this with humor and pathos, and creates a last line that evokes the
sweep of Molly Bloom's soliloquy in Ulysses—well, it knocked the
skepticism right out of me… Vivid, pungent and sweet, How to Get
Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is the kind of well-told literary novel
that restores faith in the genre. More of this,
please." –Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Hamid is as much an inventive stylist as he is a gifted
storyteller… As a result, his novels are compulsively readable, and
"Rising Asia" is no exception… Tremendously profound and
entertaining." –Alex Gilvarry, Boston Globe
“Bracingly inventive… it might be the best book you read in 2013.”
–V Magazine
"Astounding… An ambitious, moving story about love and loneliness
[that] constantly surprises… by reinventing itself just as
characters reinvent themselves… At the heart of the book is [the]
consideration of what it means to succeed, to rise or to help
oneself. How does one live and die? …The questions simmer below the
surface of this tremendous, wise and surprisingly moral book." –The
San Francisco Chronicle
“An utter delight… How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is
one of the most tender narratives you will ever read… Amazing.”
–Counterpunch
“Hamid is one of the best writers working today… How to Get Filthy
Rich in Rising Asia is filled with flashes of brilliance, deeply
moving passages, and … beautifully clear prose.” –The Millions
“Mohsin Hamid’s hotly anticipated new book tells the story of young
love between capitalism and the latest target of its cupid’s arrow:
Asia… Political, romantic, exciting, and a page-turner throughout.”
–Harper’s Bazaar
"Brilliant… In its cleverness, its slightly cruel satire and its
complex understanding of both Western and Eastern paradigms, How to
Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is pure Hamid… His storytelling
style is both timeless and contemporary, a postmodern
Scheherazade… This novel is smart about many things, including
medicine and the processes of death, but is smartest of all about
literature itself.” –Marion Winik, Newsday
"Isn’t this the definition of great fiction, that even when it
begins with a character (tubercular, hiding on the dirt floor under
his mother’s cot) who’s nothing like you, by the end you are
convinced that it really is about you? That’s a kind of miracle, of
the sort that self-help books can only dream of achieving."
–Salon
"The protagonist, who Hamid also calls 'you,' is, despite the
absence of a name or identified origin, a wonderfully
particularized person… when, in the last stages of life, 'you'
gains a measure of serenity and wisdom, you have tears in your eyes
and know that Hamid’s novel has done that which few novels are
capable of: It has deepened feeling and provoked questions about
the meaning of your own world… gripping storytelling.” –Washington
Independent Review of Books
“The kind of game Leo Tolstoy might have written, clear-eyed in its
dissection of human folly, ambition and love.” –Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel
“Although Hamid's fictional works vary in style and substance, a
distinctive sensibility pervades all three: simultaneously warm and
ironic, elegant and profane, urbane but equipped with a strong B.S.
detector.” –The Los Angeles Times
"In just 12 crisp chapters, you go from a diseased rural nobody to
the model of self-made success. It is quite a journey… [A]
considerable literary talent [who] deploy[s] the second-person
narrative with astonishing skill… Hamid depicts a land where
getting rich is not so much a luxury as a survival tactic." –The
Economist
“My recommendation for book groups this month is Mohsin Hamid's wry
third novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and it might
just satisfy both reluctant and bold literary explorers. It is at
once accessible and exotic, and most definitely filthy rich in
fresh material for literary discussion… [that] offers a
surprisingly heartfelt conclusion.” –Christian Science Monitor
"An astonishing and riveting tale of a man's journey from
impoverished rural boy to corporate tycoon." –The Nation
“Fiction fans should be grateful Mohsin Hamid left his New York
corporate cubicle to pursue his grand ambitions of becoming a
novelist.” –The Atlantic
“Effervescent… a universal story, wrought in tightly minimal,
evocative prose… Mr. Hamid has delivered a payload more nourishing
than any self-help book.” –The New York Observer
"A powerful reverie on life in a time of soul-shaking change."
–Businessweek
"Hamid’s choice to write a bildungsroman wrapped inside a self-help
manual is an inspired one… Hamid has left us with no doubts about
how state and market, law and crime, nation and corporation, and
money and violence go together—in rising Asia as in the rest of the
world." –Bookforum
“Mohsin Hamid is one of the most talented and formally audacious
writers of his generation, and his electrifying new novel… is a
vital and affecting portrait of a teeming and significant, but
largely unrecorded culture. It is a bold formal experiment
contained within an elegant novella. It is moving and charming and
funny. When you reach the end, you want to go straight back to the
beginning. And yes—that does mean you.” –The Telegraph
“Mohsin Hamid’s third novel… is many things—a love story; an
interrogation of the purpose of literary fiction; a portrait of an
Asian city… In its compassionate glimpse into another’s life,
Hamid’s novel suggests that the routes to success prescribed by
self-help books are less hopeful and compelling than the moments
that a novel so treasures, the moments in which life is lived.”
–The Sunday Telegraph
“An ultra-intelligent and knowing account of life in the developing
world, as well as an increasingly moving love-story… Simply
brilliant.” –The Daily Mail
“Daringly original… page-turning.” –The Independent
“Cast as a self-help book, about one man's rise from poverty to
wealth… Hamid’s beautifully conceived and exquisitely executed
novel demonstrates that, in the right hands, narratorial tricks can
be a serious matter, affording slants on the big realities and
myths of our time unavailable to meat-and-potato realism.” –Adam
Lively, The Sunday Times
“How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia turns out to be as much
moral fable as it is satire. Fortunately, Hamid makes each mode as
fresh as the other.” –New Statesman
“The many selves of You, our hero, form a portrait gallery of a
disconnected man in a discontinuous world. Self-help books that
aren’t a novel try to make sense of all this. And fail.” –Bryan
Appleyard, The Sunday Times
"At once a quietly moving story of an individual man and a sweeping
epic chronicling the economic, social and cultural development of
an entire region of the world." –Vox Magazine
"Hamid’s story is at once fable-like and existential… the novel is
a parable about a new kid of loneliness, a homelessness quite
different from the one characteristic of the protagonist’s
impoverished and uncertain beginnings." –The Financial Times
"How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is dead short and narrated
in a weird way that rarely gets done in novels… It’s a winning and
surprisingly readable bash at some pretty wild experimentation.
Hamid’s portrait of rising Asia makes bold use of a newfangled way
of compressing a whole life into 200 zipalong ‘hit book’ pages."
–Dazed and Confused
"Ambition rules in this playful third novel... subtle and rich."
–Publishers Weekly
“This brilliantly structured, deeply felt book is written with the
confidence and bravura of a man born to write. Hamid is at the peak
of his considerable powers here, and delivers a tightly paced,
preternaturally wise book about a thoroughly likable, thoroughly
troubled striver in the messiest, most chaotic ring of the global
economy. Completely unforgettable.” –Dave Eggers, author of A
Hologram for the King
"Mohsin Hamid is one of the best writers in the world, period. Only
a master could have written this propulsive tale of a striver
living on the knife's edge, a noir Horatio Alger story for our
frenetic, violent times. The road to filthy riches is nasty,
brutish, and long, yet Hamid's talent is such that we see the
humanity in all this striving—indeed, on finishing this
extraordinary book, one wonders if the striving might be the
sincerest expression of our flawed, fragile humanity." –Ben
Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
“A dazzling stylistic tour de force; a love story disguised as a
self-help guide, freighted with sly social satire. As timely and
timeless a novel as I’ve read in years.” –Jay McInerney, author of
Bright Lights, Big City and How It Ended
“A marvelous book.” –Philip Pullman, author of The Golden Compass
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