'I was Sisyphus, and they took my boulder away,' says the protagonist of Fehér's first novel. The character's fate is the perfect recipe for unhappiness: his mother leaves him, his father loses it, then his wife dies the day after their wedding night. Yet at the age of 21, he has already featured on the front cover of Forbes magazine as the richest person in the world. Though it is true that none of his success is of his own making. Blind Monkey is a coming-of-age novel turned on its head: the protagonist gets everything he wants, yet his life falls apart all the same. Intriguingly, it is the falling apart that shakes him out of the aimless state to which he had so easily succumbed. For a long time, his basic philosophy of life had been that if you don't do anything, you can't mess anything up. But the world doesn't think like that, and he only becomes aware of his own responsibility when he gets mixed up in an extremely bizarre psychologist experiment invented by two Nobel prize-winning happiness researchers.

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