NOTE: This guide refers to How to Get Filthy Rich in Asia - First Riverhead Trade Paperback Edition, March 2014

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a novel by Mohsin Hamid which resembles a self-help book featuring the reader (you) as the main character and recipient of its advice. Each chapter provides certain teachings about life and how your own life plays out against those instructions.

The never-named self-help guru explains that to become filthy rich in rising Asia, you must move to the city because your hometown has no hope for the future. Your family is impoverished, but your father finally makes enough to move you, your mother, and your siblings to the city. There, you are given an education which helps form a solid foundation from which you will one day become rich. While a teenager in school, you fall in love with a gorgeous young girl –hereafter known to you as “the pretty girl." You do this despite the narrator’s insistence that falling in love will distract you from your life goal of getting rich. You are brokenhearted when the girl decides she is leaving to become a model.

Slowly, your career begins to climb. You avoid idealists and learn from a master. The master is a man who oversees an empire of repackaging out-of-date food and selling it to local businesses. You save up enough money to go into business for yourself. Your business purifies, bottles, and sells water to people who would otherwise be forced to drink polluted city water. Your business takes off quickly, and you rapidly expand into new buildings and new markets. You come afoul of a rival water bottling company by drawing away their business, and your life is threatened. You reach out to a gang and have them settle the dispute. All the while, you watch with longing as the pretty girl becomes a full-fledged celebrity model. Now in your forties, you marry a girl half your age, have a son, and continue to see ways to grow your business.

Years pass. You end up taking on municipal contracts for the city. As the narrator recommends, you get in bed with government and military officials. The money pours in, and you design and live in a gated, guarded community of gated, guarded mansions. Your son grows and moves to America. Your marriage falls apart as distance grows between you and your wife. Your business slowly begins to decline. Friends and allies turn against you. A relative steals money from the company. Your business falls apart; you suffer two heart attacks; and, you come to live in a hotel. In such a situation, you must focus on the fundamentals, advises the narrator. You do when you reconnect with the pretty girl, now an old woman. You begin a romantic relationship with her that lasts a few years until cancer takes her life. Sometime later, you follow her in death, and she is there to welcome you to Heaven.