There's a tremendous energy about the novel, reflected in the protagonist's unstoppable drive, but sometimes one wishes it didn't move quite so fast. We warm to his pluck and his latent sense of romance as well his absence of self-pity. If he's a rogue trader, he's operating in a vast gallery of rogues – business competitors, police, bureaucrats, politicians – and in his case, at least, he's a lovable rogue. He sells food with false eat-by dates and then creates his own business boiling water, bottling it in used containers and relabelling it as mineral water. With admirable determination our hero uses his street cunning and entrepreneurial instincts to work his way out of grinding destitution. Hamid is particularly good on the stomach-churning depths of squalor – placing the reader right inside the dank confines of the poor – and the stagnant ironies of developing nations, where teachers dream of being electricity meter readers. Given the advantage over his siblings of some basic education, he migrates to a slum in a sprawling megacity.

The self, or the directly addressed 'you' at the centre of the story, is a peasant male in some unspecified corner of Asia – although it doesn't take a lot of guesswork to identify Hamid's native Pakistan as the inspiration – whom we follow from impoverished birth through to a more comfortable death. It's a clever idea that soon falls victim to Hamid's cleverness, as he can't seem to make up his mind if he wants to parody the genre or use it as a springboard for quasi-philosophical digressions on the 'self'. Instead he seeks to create a more collusive enticement in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, made explicit with the conceit of a self-help guide.

But Hamid is too deft a craftsman simply to bully the reader.

How to get filthy rich in asia