AustLit

'"Of all the sins, pride is the deadliest."

'For Jason Roche, an Australian working in London's foreign exchange market, a life is only well lived if you're the centre of a glittering universe - big bucks in the bank, a swank flat in Belgravia, an Aston Martin in the garage, and a trophy girlfriend in the bedroom. Jason spends his days gambling with nine-figure sums of other people's money, and his nights partying with his A-list aristocrat fiancee, Tabitha. This is London, 2003, awash in money, sex, drugs and all the bling filthy lucre can buy... Everything and everyone has a price. Or so Jason - proud, vain and virtually morally bankrupt - believes.

'But Jason's precarious existence is upset by the arrival of Tabitha's older brother, Zachary, an upper-class eccentric who left his manic life in London to live in Japan with a sect of Buddhist zealots. Zach has come home to put his affairs in order, before returning to Japan to achieve enlightenment. The only thing is, his version of enlightenment involves meeting his maker. Jason decides he must save Zach from his sect and sets about luring him back into the worldly ways of the life he intends to leave behind. But, in the course of doing so, Jason is forced to confront the possibility that Zach does not have a price, nor does friendship, and that it might just be he who is in need of salvation.' (From the publisher's website.)