Srinath Adiga

* I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to review this book. *

Raymond Li is a corrupt Hong Kong trader who loses all of his gangster client's money. Desperate to find a quick money-making idea, he comes up with the concept of Afterlife Dollars - investing your money in a financial instrument that you can draw down on after you die, in order to buy your way into heaven.

Li's idea takes off beyond his wildest dreams, and grows to being traded all over the world, with branches of Li's Bank of Eternity opening up in other nations, and taking huge sums from customers eager to ensure a good life after death.

The book is a series of three connected stories. The first is the account of Li's predicament and his cunning invention. The second story is set in Mumbai years later, where a young man discovers that he has a terminal illness and starts to be attracted to the idea of Afterlife Dollars. The final story is about a Dutch investment banker who has identified the desperate threat that Afterlife Dollars poses to the real-world economy, but is forced by his employers to sell them as an investment anyway.

This is a very sharp novel based on a clever concept that I have not encountered elsewhere. Adiga takes what could have been quite a comedic notion in his first story, and then develops it into a tale about a credible threat to the world as we know it. He ties together a lot of themes, including the dark economy, the basic assumptions on which our economic system relies, the effects of economic crashes, and even pandemics. It feels like a very current and even somewhat prescient critique of global capitalism and its weaknesses.… (más)