My Bags Are Big

Synopsis

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.

Praise for This Book

‘Brisk criminality. Lovable roguishness. Bags of cleverness and world-weary wisdom.’ —Michael Hofmann

‘A triumph. Fischer more valuable than Bitcoin! Buy now!’ —Peter Benson

‘My Bags Are Big is Tibor Fischer’s best yet: every page as dazzling as it is inimitable. This may be the crypto novel, but its prose is never cryptic. With Fischer, you know exactly where you are: caught up in the infernal comedy of unrequited desire and bereft of all that you thought you knew about the meaning of life.’ —Daniel Johnson

‘Sardonic and hilarious. This is the first great Bitcoin novel.’ —Andrew M. Bailey

Reviews of This Book

‘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.’ —Houman Barekat, The Guardian

‘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.’ —Ian Sansom, The Spectator

‘My Bags Are Big, a scorchingly funny tale set in the world of cryptocurrency.’ —Chris Harvey, The Telegraph

‘Dan is a sixty-year-old British expat, living comfortably in Dubai thanks to his crypto windfall but unable to let go of his native Catford. Despite his bags being full of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, despite nattering with royals and aristocrats, he wears twenty-year-old T-shirts and drives a used Citroën – none of it ironically. It is not false modesty or simple nostalgia that guides Dan. It is an unsettling self-deprecation, underpinned by mourning. … Fischer is “a master of the bitter laugh”, but this latest narrator, however worn down, doesn’t smack of bitterness. At his core, we are led to understand, he is a decent guy who believes in making “others happy when you can”. … Dan is an enigma – and a truly enjoyable one to try to solve.’ —Kyle Wyatt, TLS

‘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.’ —Anthony Cummins, Mail on Sunday

‘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.’ —Sophie Charara, Shortlist

‘The book’s underlying point is timeless: Money never fixes meaning. It just strips away the excuses.’ —Cory Klippsten, X.com

‘Vulgar and irreverent ... part life biography, part perverted fantasy. He has me bent over in laughter more than once.’ —Stacker News

Praise for 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.’ —The Guardian

‘(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!’ —Michael Hofmann

‘(On The Thought Gang) Acerbic, dashingly inventive, very funny indeed.’ —Christopher Hitchens, Mail on Sunday

‘(On The Thought Gang) An erudite web of digressions and ruminations intended to provide a portrait of the narrator's soul.’ —Sunday Times

‘(On The Thought Gang) Fischer has a unique ability to hinge the most unlikely concepts together... charcoaling ideas to gem-hardened, irresistibly funny insights.’ —Time Out

‘(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.’ —Sunday Telegraph

‘(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.’ —The Times

‘(On The Thought Gang) Fischer's fecund imagination keeps the satire constantly engaging.’ —The Daily Mail