Lake Success

Gary Shteyngart Hamish Hamilton €21.10

After a drunken row with his wife, hedge-fund honcho Barry Cohen boards a bus to reunite with the woman he loved at university. As the multi-millionaire absorbs the charms of travelling poor and the seedier quarters of Baltimore, Atlanta, Jackson and El Paso, he also revisits, Scrooge-like, past and present guilt: his autistic son, a sacked colleague, a bad stock held too long, an insider chat topside a yacht off Sardinia. Shteyngart’s comic energy is well deployed on the ridiculously rich.