Inside the Red Mansion is a picaresque adventure that provides a look at a part of modern China rarely glimpsed by the outside world. -James Fallows, national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly Due to a mixup on a routine reporting assignment, Oliver August stumbles onto the hunt for China's most wanted man, Lai Changxing, an illiterate tycoon on the run from corruption charges. Sensing something emblematic in the outsized tale of Lai's rise and fall, August sets out to find the selfmade billionaire, hoping that if he can understand how Lai reinvented himself, he will also better grasp the tectonic forces transforming modern China. Lai embodies the story of China's recent success as well as its Achilles' heel: its command economy, blended with the free market, is riddled with corruption. Moving ever closer to the elusive tycoon, August introduces us to a people in the midst of headspinning selftransformation. We meet a nightclub hostess and her gaggle of Miss Temporaries; powerful business man on a debtsettling 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 slapstick fight with its past, and hellbent on the future. After studying philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford University

Oliver August joined the Times of London to become it's youngest-ever New York correspondent. He spent seven years in China as the Beijing bureau chief and moved to the Middle East in 2006.