It is the 1970s. After a bloody struggle, Bangladesh is an independent nation. But thousands are pouring into Dhaka from all over the country, looking for food and shelter.  Among them is Nur Hussain, an uneducated young man from a remote village, who is only good at mimicking a famous speech of the prime minister's.  He turns up at journalist Khaleque Biswas’s doorstep, seeking employment.  Initially Nur is a burden for Khaleque, but then Khaleque, who has recently lost his job, has the idea of turning Nur into a fake Sheikh Mujib. With the blessings of the political establishment, he starts cashing in on the nationalist fervour of the city’s poorest. But even as the money rolls in, the tension between the two men increases and reaches a violent climax when Nur refuses to stick to the script.
Intense yet chilling, this brilliant first novel is a meditation on power, greed and the human cost of politics.

What does it take for you to climb from complete poverty to a mansion, bullet-proof car and bodyguards? Twelve simple rules . . .
 
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is the story of a young boy, born into a poor family. As the years pass, he moves to a slum in the city, gets a brief education, flirts with militancy, and then, hungry for advancement, sets up a bottled water business, the ultimate symbol of the modern South Asian city—a place where nothing works but everything can be had at a price. But as he leaves his past behind, one thing remains constant and true—his love for the girl he met as a teenager.
 
Told through the conventions of a self-help guide to becoming rich, this is a dazzling and virtuoso novel from the acclaimed author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

Gideon Haigh on Shane Warne is an irresistible pairing: 'the finest cricket writer alive' (The Australian) on the greatest cricketer of our times. Gideon Haigh on Shane Warne is an irresistible pairing: 'the finest cricket writer alive' (The Australian) on the greatest cricketer of our times. The resulting masterpiece is as much about our fascination with Warnie as it is about the player himself. Who doesn't know the name Shane Warne?Now that the Australian cricketer who dominated  airwaves and headlines for twenty years has turned full‐time celebrity and media event, his sporting conquests and controversies are receding steadily into the past.

But what was it like to watch Warne at his long peak, the man of a thousand international wickets, the incarnation of Australian audacity and cheek? Our leading cricket writer, Gideon Haigh, lived and loved the Warne era, when the impossible was everyday, and the sensational every other day. In On Warne, he relives the era's highs, its lows, its fun and its follies. Drawing on interviews conducted with Warne over the course of a decade, and two decades of watching him play, Haigh assesses this greatest of sportsmen as cricketer, character, comrade, newsmaker and national figure ‐ a natural in an increasingly regimented time, a simplifier in a  growingly complicated world. The result is one of the finest cricket books ever written, a whole new way of looking at its subject, at sport, and at Australia. One day, you might be asked what cricket in the time of Warne was like. On Warne is the definitive account.                                                                                                              

This is the story of a city. The north-west corner of a city. Here you'll find guests and hosts, those with power and those without it, people who live somewhere special and others who live nowhere at all. And many people in between. Every city is like this. Cheek-by-jowl living. Separate worlds. And then there are the visitations: the rare times a stranger crosses a threshold without permission or warning, causing a disruption in the whole system. Like the April afternoon a woman came to Leah Hanwell's door, seeking help, disturbing the peace, forcing Leah out of her isolation . . . Zadie Smith's brilliant tragi-comic new novel follows four Londoners - Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan - as they try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their childhood. From private houses to public parks, at work and at play, their London is a complicated place, as beautiful as it is brutal, where the thoroughfares hide the back alleys and taking the high road can sometimes lead you to a dead end. Depicting the modern urban zone - familiar to town-dwellers everywhere - Zadie Smith's NW is a quietly devastating novel of encounters, mercurial and vital, like the city itself.