Due to a mix-up, Oliver August stumbles on to the hunt for China's most wanted man. Lai Changxing is an illiterate tycoon and on the run from corruption charges. Sensing something emblematic in his outsized tale of rise and fall, August tries to find the self-made billionaire and understand how he reinvented himself.

Lai embodies the story of China's recent success, as well as its Achilles heel. The blending of its command economy with the free market is riddled with corruption. Moving ever closer to the elusive tycoon, August's introduces us to a people in the midst of head-spinning self-transformation. We meet a nightclub hostess and her gaggle of "Miss Temporaries"; powerful businessmen on a debt settling round of nocturnal golf; and a foie gras king who markets his goose liver by the ton and prefers it deep fried. This is a China seething with desire, engaged in a slap-stick fight with its past, and hell bent on the future.

"Inside the Red Mansion" is the first book to capture the giddy vibe of contemporary China and its darker vulnerabilities.