Mohsin Hamid has spent years in the United States, holds a British passport and lives in his native Lahore, Pakistan – and all of the above are reflected in this moving and thought provoking page turner of a self help book turned novel – and vice versa.

It is, as the title reveals, a book about making it big in a changing world. It’s the story of an upward mobile “you” (it is a self help book after all) who rises from an impoverished childhood in a rural village in an unnamed country to becoming a successful city businessman and the high price this trajectory extolls along the way.

“You” have the good fortune of being the youngest of three and therefore able to finish school (your older brother is sent out to work and your sister married off).

“There are forks in the road to wealth that have nothing to do with choice or desire or effort, forks that have to do with chance, and in your case, the order for your birth is one of these. Third means you are not heading back to your village. Third means you are not working as a painter’s assistant. Third also means that you are not, like the fourth of you three surviving siblings, a tiny skeleton in a small grave at the base of a tree”.

Making the best of your able mind “you” quickly get a job selling expired goods to small vendors and soon after enter the business that will ultimately bring you fame and fortune – bottling boiled water and selling it on as mineral water. A lucrative business in a city – and country – where clean water is a precious commodity. Along the way you meet “the pretty girl” and while you believe that she is “the one”, she clearly has plans of her own and not afraid to do whatever it takes to eject her way out of her unhappy life. As a parallel story we get to follow “the pretty girl’s” rise to fame as a model and later successful business woman in her own right. Hamid offers – in a refreshingly matter of fact, yet very moving style, the two characters’ love story as it ebbs and flows throughout their lives.

How to get filthy rich in Rising Asia is a remarkable account of what it takes to make it in a world of rampant nepotism, corruption and poverty where only the most able – physically and emotionally – make it to the top. A story of what really matters in life (again, it is a self help book after all), a novel that describes “normal” life in many different variations, in a world we feel so familiar with from the news, yet it is vastly different from what we imagine.

Getting filthy rich in rising Asia is no easy feat – there are hardships to endure, many of which stem from living in a society that is not yet able to care for its people, in a country in constant political turmoil. Yet, Mohsin Hamid succeeds in infusing this elegant book with warmth and wit creating an understanding of and empathy with our main protagonists, even when the choices they make are far removed from those we could imagine ourselves making.

Towards the end of the book Hamid shares his thoughts on writing, on telling a life story, on how we search to explain through writing. I leave you with a passage from the book which so beautifully sums up the sense of the book, the elegance and the reality of it.

“Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone, and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.”

Enjoy!

Isabella

On the morning of Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary, Amy disappears. Gone. The front door is wide open and the lounge room is in disarray with obvious signs of a struggle. The police and media suspect Nick. ‘It’s always the husband’.

While Nick comes off as aloof and insensitive, it is hard to believe he is a killer. Yet Amy’s diary, found in their house, tells a different story. She grew afraid of him and kept secrets from him.

Gone Girl is written as a first person narrative, alternating between Nick and Amy. Nick talks to us as it happens, and Amy, via diary entries from their years together. Flynn’s portrayal of the alternating male and female perspective is believable, as she weaves the tale of a love story gone horribly wrong.

Gone Girl is clever. It’s shocking, mostly fast paced and witty, with chuckle-out-loud lines in amongst the intrigue of this thriller slash relationship novel.

So did he or didn’t he? It’s difficult to review Gone Girl without ‘spoilers’ but I’ll try not to spill too much!

What I can say is that Gone Girl is packed with twists and turns, one huge one that changes the direction of the book. But the ending was rather wishy-washy! Yet left open for a sequel maybe?

Gone Girl has sold more than two million copies worldwide and rumored to be made into a movie staring Reese Witherspoon. It’s a book made for book clubs and there were many varying opinions at ours! Read it for a rather thrilling book for your book club or to discuss with friends over a glass of wine.

Lara (The Books & Company Book Club)

The Danish philosopher Søren Kirkegaard was born 200 years ago this month, so we decided to allow his and many other Great Ideas to take flight in our window!

Helping them along are a flock of gorgeous Origami birds carefully folded by a Books & Company regular, 13-year old Mathilde Flinth Bredholt. Thank you, Mathilde!

As we celebrate the liberation of Denmark on May 5, 1945, we are reminded of the ultimate sacrifice made by so many during those dark years. Yet in the midst of remembrance we must not allow ourselves to forget that similar sacrifices are being made at this very moment, far from our shores, perhaps, but also by men and women in uniform and out.

Literature helps us see and understand the horrors of war. However, it is said that war literature requires distance in time and emotion.

Just think of Erich Maria Remarque’s best-selling book about the First World War, Im Western nichts Neues, (All Quiet on the Western Front), published in 1929, “Het Achterhuis” (Diary of Anne Frank), in 1947, and the lesser known What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng published in 2006, depicting a young man’s life during the Second Sudanese civil war in the late 1980s.

What these and many other works have in common is a description of lives, conditions and circumstances that most of us can only begin to imagine – the physical trials of living in barracks, battlefields and refugee camps, the psychological aftermath, the doubts, the fear, the regrets, the enormous loss experienced over and over.

On this tenth anniversary of the Iraq war and at the tail end of what has been dubbed The Arab Wars, we see the emergence of literature examining lives touched by these wars. One such book is The Yellow Birds.

Written by veteran and poet Kevin Powers (Powers served twice in the Iraq war) Yellow Birds is an intense debut novel with strong emotions and characters, writing that doesn’t even try to soften the blow and a first line that pulls you in straight away:

“The war tried to kill us in the Spring”.

There are aspects of war that one might understand; the need; the strategic considerations and perhaps even the necessary sacrifice. What is virtually impossible to grasp, however, is the cost in terms of who you become as a person, once you have seen battle. The Yellow Birds allows us to move a little closer to an understanding of this highest price paid.

The novel follows Pvt John Bartle as he tries to come to terms with his life before, during and after his service in Iraq, where suddenly “There was no center in the world.The curves of all our bells were cracked”. The storyline carries you back and forth from Virginia to Iraq to Germany to New Jersey and Kentucky and back, over the course of a few years.

Powers has a master’s degree in poetry – and it shows. The beautiful language and dazzling descriptions of events and details draw you in almost to the point of active participation.

Be it in describing the motivation behind signing up:

“…and really cowardice got you into this mess, because you wanted to be a man”,

or in the agonizing attempts at making yourself understood to a world you left as one person and are returning to as someone completely different:

“I feel like I am being eaten from the inside out and I can’t tell anyone what’s going on because everyone is so grateful to me all the time and I’ll feel like I’m ungrateful or something. Or like I’ll give away that I don’t deserve anyone’s gratitude and really they should all hate me for what I’ve done but everyone loves me for it and it’s driving me crazy”.

The beauty of the novel lies in the contrast between the almost serene descriptions of actions and milieu and the cruelty of the subject matter, as in the passages describing Daniel Murphy, a fellow soldier, as he completely dissolves, disappears and self destructs.

We turn away so easily from the horrors of war – we don’t like to watch it on television and we don’t like it spread across our breakfast tables on the front page of our newspapers.

But unless we experience it first hand (and few of us ever will) we will not understand what the people of Syria, Afghanistan and other countries are going through, so we must force ourselves to look at the evidence of war, and read accounts – fictional and otherwise – lest we forget that while there is no war at this moment on this continent, there are millions of victims – soldiers and civilians alike – who need us to remember that they too would like to live in peace.