Called “both an irresistibly engaging adventure and a searching portrait of contemporary young people in Pakistan” (Joyce Carol Oates), internationally bestselling author Mohsin Hamid’s first novel, Moth Smoke, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. It was followed by the elegantly subversive novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which was named a Book of the Decade by The Guardian and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Hamid’s stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and The Paris Review. Playing on the format of self-help books used by ambitious youth, Hamid’s new novel charts a rural boy’s climb to business tycoon as he amasses an empire selling the most scant and necessary of resources: water.