‘You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you,” affirms the narrator of Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel, a darkly comic tale masquerading as a self-help guide.

Hamid is the author of two previous novels. “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” his second, was seamlessly structured into a single conversation between a young Pakistani man and an American traveler in the wake of 9/11. Hamid is as much an inventive stylist as he is a gifted storyteller, and he’s very interested in playing with the novel’s form, or rather, renewing it, without sacrificing too many narrative essentials. As a result, his novels are compulsively readable, and “Rising Asia” is no exception.