My Bags Are Big

The best fiction to read this year —New Statesman

Our 25 most anticipated fiction books for 2026 —Shortlist Magazine

My Bags Are Big, a darkly comic satire of wealth, reinvention, and regret – set against the surreal backdrop of Dubai.

'Is it merely a long con? Is Bitcoin just a mighty payday, or have I gatecrashed one of the great moments of history? Up there with the enslavement of fire, the invention of writing, the power of flight. A moment everyone will be pointing to for thousands of years, as long as there are people to point. And Dan was there. Bitcoin rulz okay?'

With Fischer's trademark wit, philosophical flair, and scathing insight into the absurdities of modern life, My Bags Are Big is a brilliant satire of masculinity, memory, and the costs of pretending you've moved on.

Sardonic and hilarious. This is the first great Bitcoin novel.

(on previous work) (On Under the Frog) I began Under the Frog on a crowded double decker in a London traffic jam … and soon found myself laughing like an idiot … It is a triumph … painfully moving, it is also uproariously funny.



(on previous work) (On Under the Frog) A quite wonderful book … He takes a serious subject … and is seriously funny about it … the result is plausible, insolent, sophisticated and hungry … Glorious!



(on previous work) (On The Thought Gang) Acerbic, dashingly inventive, very funny indeed.



(on previous work) (On The Thought Gang) An erudite web of digressions and ruminations intended to provide a portrait of the narrator's soul.



(on previous work) (On The Thought Gang) Fischer has a unique ability to hinge the most unlikely concepts together... charcoaling ideas to gem-hardened, irresistibly funny insights.



(on previous work) (On The Thought Gang) There are a lot of funny lines … Good to be God dramatises the neuroses of a man mired in middle age who is dismally disappointed with the way things have panned out.



(on previous work) (On The Thought Gang) Deciding that identity fraud lacks ambition, Tyndale Corbett attempts to convince the people of Miami that he is God. His inadvertent success has unholy and darkly comic consequences.



(on previous work) (On The Thought Gang) Fischer's fecund imagination keeps the satire constantly engaging.



In an ever-changing world, some people can be relied upon to remain fully themselves. Fischer, who is just a few years older than his narrator, made a literary splash in the 90s with novels including The Thought Gang, a surreal caper about a philosopher turned bank robber. Thirty years on, he has conceived another renegade chancer; the storytelling is zippier here, and the absurdism slightly dialled down, but the jaunty voice and cynical, compulsively wisecracking comic sensibility are unchanged.



If you long for that far-off time when novels were prepared to be hilariously funny, vulgar, caustic, wildly politically incorrect and highly improbable you are going to love My Bags Are Big. Tibor Fischer has always been happy to write against the pieties of the age, whatever they might be.



My Bags Are Big, a scorchingly funny tale set in the world of cryptocurrency.



My Bags Are Big is a taut book that needs to be read at least twice … Like crypto itself, Dan is an enigma – and a truly enjoyable one to try to solve.



THE BEST NEW FICTION Crackling with quips, [Tibor Fischer's] new novel follows a widowed Bitcoin trader in Dubai, recalling the sexual shenanigans and dodgy deals of his rackety salad days in south London. A knockabout satire with a nice line in wry self-deflation.



10 new fiction books to kickstart your 2026 reading list The novel clips along … in large part down to Dan's hustle-propelled, crime-adjacent life story and a cast of eccentric characters with delicious names.



The book's underlying point is timeless: Money never fixes meaning. It just strips away the excuses.



Vulgar and irreverent ... part life biography, part perverted fantasy. He has me bent over in laughter more than once. weniger anzeigen expand_less