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Synopsis

Having made the U.S. financial crisis comprehensible for us all in The Big Short, Michael Lewis realised that he hadn't begun to get grips with the full story. How exactly had it come to hit the rest of the world in the face too? Just how broke are we really?

Boomerang is a tragi-comic romp across Europe, in which Lewis gives full vent to his storytelling genius. The cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge.

Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers. The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a piñata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack. The Irish wanted to stop being Irish. The Germans wanted to be even more German. Michael Lewis's investigation of bubbles across Europe is brilliantly, sadly hilarious. He also turns a merciless eye on America: on California, the epicentre of world consumption, where we see that a final reckoning awaits the most avaricious of nations too.

This is the ultimate book of our times. It's time to brace ourselves for impact. And, with Michael Lewis, to laugh out loud while we're doing it.

» Read the first pages of Boomerang by downloading the Penguin Taster here

» Visit Penguin Tasters

Reviews

Critic Review:

‘This is the best financial book of the year… [Michael Lewis is] a brilliant journalist, getting extraordinary access to public figures in countries such as Ireland and Greece who confess their fiscal sins to him in a way that no other writer has come close to achieving. I'm very jealous,’ The Sunday Times

‘Michael Lewis possesses the rare storyteller's ability to make virtually any subject both lucid and compelling,’ Michiko Kakutani Michael, The Scotsman

‘We can now see that what once seemed fiendishly difficult was in fact fiendishly simple… [Lewis is] determined to cut through the forest of dull subplots to get to the action,’ Andrew Anthony, The Observer

‘He is able to tell lively, vivid tales on dry, opaque subjects like baseball statistics and high yield bond trading because he illuminates them through the stories of extraordinary individuals, mavericks, oddballs and misfits almost to a man. Lewis has managed to inveigle his way into the lives of so many of his characters - to possess them, even, in the way a fiction writer might possess his creations,’ Stephen Foley, The Independent

‘Lucid, entertaining expositions of complicated financial subjects,’ Tony Barber, Financial Times

‘Predictably excellent and strikingly up to date,’ Simon English, Evening Standard

‘Far from being depressing, it's a hilarious romp that will have you laughing out loud at the great one liners that just say it all… highly entertaining and perceptive,’ Siobhan Creaton, Belfast Telegraph Morning

‘Boomerang is one of the most spectacularly well-timed books in recent publishing history, and Lewis is rapidly becoming one of America's most successful modern writers,’ Paul Harris, The Guardian

‘Most people who write well don't understand money, while most people who understand money can't write. Lewis … is that rare combination: a fellow who can not only tell you what a collateralised debt obligation actually is, but make it sound amusing into the bargain’ Robert Harris, The Sunday Times

‘So just how bad is the state of the Western economy right now? If you'd rather not know, then I seriously wouldn't recommend Boomerang, the latest tour de force from Wall Street banker turned bestselling financial author Michael Lewis,’ James Delingpole, The Mail on Sunday

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