[1] It tells the story of Darashikoh Shezad, a banker in Lahore, Pakistan, who loses his job, falls in love with his best friend's wife, and plunges into a life of drugs and crime.

It uses the historical trial of the liberal Mughal prince Dara Shikoh by his brother Aurangzeb as an allegory for the state of Pakistan at the time of the 1998 nuclear tests.

This contrast in income, though present through their years at school becomes evident to Daru only now as he realizes that money and wealth mean more than his personal traits can offer.

In a highly positive review for The New York Times, Jhumpa Lahiri compared Hamid to F. Scott Fitzgerald for depicting the "slippery ties between the extremely wealthy and those who hover, and generally stumble, in money’s glare".

[2] In The New York Review of Books, Anita Desai noted: "One could not really continue to write, or read about, the slow seasonal changes, the rural backwaters, gossipy courtyards, and traditional families in a world taken over by gun-running, drug-trafficking, large-scale industrialism, commercial entrepreneurship, tourism, new money, nightclubs, boutiques... Where was the Huxley, the Orwell, the Scott Fitzgerald, or even the Tom Wolfe, Jay McInerney, or Brett Easton Ellis to record this new world?