The Best Scandal Ever is a comedic caper set in the whimsical world of motivational speaking and alternative health. The mysterious chief of White Industries, Richard White, is getting older and desires to secure the future of his glorious company. Meanwhile, his nephew, Dwayne, just wants a quiet life. How will our herbal heroes save the world from the impending doom of the alternative health industry?

Set over five years, the novel humorously explores some of the more amusing elements of life in the health and public speaking business. It then delves into one of the key marketing issues of our time: how to ensure that industry budgets do not dictate individual beliefs in the absence of regulation.

This lighthearted parody, with an underlying serious message, will make you reflect on how much you are influenced by the subtext of advertising and the subterfuge of the new economic war.

The tsunami of 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 at it. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish.

Michael Lewis's investigation of bubbles beyond our shores is so brilliantly, sadly hilarious that it leads the American reader to a comfortable complacency: oh, those foolish foreigners. But when he turns a merciless eye on California and Washington, DC, we see that the narrative is a trap baited with humor, and we understand the reckoning that awaits the greatest and greediest of debtor nations.