The Bonfire of the Vanities is a masterpiece, a riotous, exuberant and passionate epic that captures the greed and corruption of eighties New York and examines it under the microscope of Wolfe's famed satiric wit.Sherman McCoy, Wall Street wunderkind, seems to have it all; a salary like a telephone number, a home on Park Avenue, a beautiful wife and child, a mistress, a Mercedes. He is a Master of the Universe! But then he gets lost one dark night in the Bronx, and his mercedes hits something. That something turns out to be Henry Lamb, a young black man who is now in a coma; for Sherman meanwhile, everything is about to unravel so fast he will hardly have time to change his thousand dollar suit.'One of the funniest, finest and most dramatic American novels of recent times . . . the most enthralling book I've read in years'EVENING STANDARD