"Longlisted The Man Booker Prize 2014"--Cover.

Distraught by a breakup with his long-term girlfriend, a young man leaves New York to take an unusual job in the strange desert metropolis of Dubai at the height of its self-invention as a futuristic Shangri-la where he struggles with his new position as the "family officer" of the capricious and very rich Batros family. And he struggles, even more helplessly, with the doghouse,? a seemingly inescapable condition of culpability in which he feels himself constantly trapped, even if he is just going to the bathroom, or reading e-mail, or scuba diving. A comic and philosophically profound exploration of what has become of humankind's moral progress, this novel is told with Joseph O'Neill's hallmark eloquence, empathy, and storytelling mastery. It is a brilliantly original, achingly funny fable for our globalized times.