A memoir by Paul Oberschneider · Publishing Spring 2027
Coming Clean
Confessions of an Entrepreneur
Addiction. Emerging markets. The cost of success.
For years, the manuscript sat in a shoebox in a drawer. Inside it: the pawnshop tickets, the eviction notice, the night a Wall Street career ended at twenty-seven, and the forty years of staying sober that came after. This is the book Paul Oberschneider finally decided to publish.
His work has been covered in
ForbesThe Wall Street JournalWhat he had in his pocket when he landed in Estonia in 1992, the year after Wall Street and the year the Soviet flag came down.
Six countries, 650 people. The business he built across the emerging markets of post-Soviet Europe.
Built a Christmas market to fill a hotel nobody visited in December. It became one of Europe’s best, and Estonia honoured him for it.
The year the window closed. He sold out months before the crash took the market with it.
Sober. He hit bottom at twenty-seven. Everything in this book happened after that.
From the Prologue
“My father crossed the Atlantic to get away from a ruined Europe. Thirty years later I crossed it the other way, broke, to start again in the ruins of another empire. Neither of us would have called it courage. It was just the only door that was open.”
Paul Oberschneider · Coming Clean
What you’ll read first
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In your free preview
Prologue — The Manuscript in the Drawer
Why a man who had told the success story a hundred times finally took the other story out of the shoebox. Then came the part nobody talks about.
In your free preview
Chapter One — Home
A Texas childhood under a father who was the most admired man in town and the most frightening man in the house — and where the running started.
Later in the book
The Market in the Square
A luxury hotel in a country that had just left the Soviet Union, empty every December. What he built in the old town square to fill it, and what it became.
From the Estonia years
About the author
Paul Oberschneider
Paul Oberschneider arrived in Estonia in 1992 with $400 and a Wall Street career already behind him — ended, at twenty-seven, by the addiction this book finally names. Over the next sixteen years he built one of the largest real-estate businesses in post-Soviet Europe: 35 offices, six countries, 650 people. He sold it in 2008, months before the crash.
Along the way he built the country’s first luxury hotel, discovered nobody comes to the Baltics in December, and built a Christmas market in the old town square to fill it. It is now among the most visited in Europe, and the Estonian state honoured him for it. He has made a habit of building the demand when the demand did not exist.
Today he is forty years sober, chairs a London investment firm, and lives in the English countryside. Coming Clean is his first memoir.
“The success story was always true. It just wasn’t the whole story.”
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Media enquiries: durga@thebookpublicist.co.uk