This book is great. The plot is unusual and hard to envisage from the beginning, making the story immediately intriguing. Characters are well depicted and carefully drawn, creating empathy with the reader and embellishing the action with their own idiosyncrasies. I really enjoyed the whole experience and have to applaud the author for a stupendous first novel. It reminds me a little of White Teeth (Zadie Smith) and Perfume (Patrick Suskind) with its descriptive observations. Highly recommended.
Baber Mittough's life takes an unexpected turn, as he is catapulted from leafy suburbia to the murky alphabet soup of Kazakhstan's underworld.
This dark, comic tale unfolds as engineer Baber is sold by his employer to a questionable Kazakhstan businessman. When the irresistible Irena, and two ageing hippies, who just might be Baber's absentee parents, befriend Baber, he begins to suspect his new job isn't quite all it seems.
Things start to go wrong when Baber unwittingly stumbles into a world of deceit and treachery and it becomes clear he is getting a little too close to the truth.
