Title: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

Author: Mohsin Hamid

Year: 2013

Summary: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a parable on the impossibility of becoming, or perhaps remaining, filthy rich in rising Asia. The second-person narrative parodies the self-help genre, as a "poor boy" and a "pretty girl" try to claw their way out of poverty in an unnamed country that very much resembles Pakistan. The self-help conceit offers unique insight into the ways in which the poor are stripped of agency: the reader is given the false impression that she can chart her own path, but the novel's plot is predetermined, carefully structured, and without room for deviation. The novel's main protagonist, and the reader's closest avatar, seeks to make his fortune by bottling and selling water. Overuse, pollution, and climate change, all of which make water a vulnerable and precious resource, contribute to ambient environmental and economic anxiety throughout.

Major Awards: Shortlisted for the Internationaler Literaturpreis – Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature

Citation: Hamid, Mohsin. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Penguin, 2013.