Fragrant Harbor
Type
Book
Authors
ISBN 10
0399148663
ISBN 13
9780399148668
Category
823 English Fiction
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Publication Year
2002
Publisher
Pages
342
Subject
Hong Kong (China) -- Fiction. China -- Hong Kong.
Tags
Abstract
Publisher Comments
It is 1935 and Tom Stewart, a young Englishman with an almost visceral longing for adventure, has bought himself a cheap ticket to the complex, corrupt, and corrupting world of Hong Kong. Aboard ship, he becomes the pawn in a wager between a bluff businessman and a Chinese missionary nun, who bets she can teach him Cantonese on the six-week voyage out. What begins as friendship turns into solace and then a passion that only individual vows can remit.
Fragrant Harbor takes the reader from the intrigue and double-dealing of the 1930s through the savagery of the Japanese occupation to contemporary Hong Kong, crossroads of international trade and finance and waystation for laundering the dirty money of warlords, drug runners, and Chinese triads. The novel ends three years after the Mainland takeover, with Hong Kong as greedy, corrupt, and corrupting as when Stewart first landed there.
Writing with the same fine style and observant eye that distinguished his previous novels, John Lanchester depicts a tumultuous time and place and then peoples it with extraordinary characters. The result is a novel that proves he is amongour most versatile and talented contemporary novelists-indeed, as The New York Times wrote, "Lanchester is a commanding writer."
It is 1935 and Tom Stewart, a young Englishman with an almost visceral longing for adventure, has bought himself a cheap ticket to the complex, corrupt, and corrupting world of Hong Kong. Aboard ship, he becomes the pawn in a wager between a bluff businessman and a Chinese missionary nun, who bets she can teach him Cantonese on the six-week voyage out. What begins as friendship turns into solace and then a passion that only individual vows can remit.
Fragrant Harbor takes the reader from the intrigue and double-dealing of the 1930s through the savagery of the Japanese occupation to contemporary Hong Kong, crossroads of international trade and finance and waystation for laundering the dirty money of warlords, drug runners, and Chinese triads. The novel ends three years after the Mainland takeover, with Hong Kong as greedy, corrupt, and corrupting as when Stewart first landed there.
Writing with the same fine style and observant eye that distinguished his previous novels, John Lanchester depicts a tumultuous time and place and then peoples it with extraordinary characters. The result is a novel that proves he is amongour most versatile and talented contemporary novelists-indeed, as The New York Times wrote, "Lanchester is a commanding writer."
Description
Review
"[A] suspenseful and poignant triumph of storytelling and an atmospheric portrait of a fabled city....Lanchester steeps the narrative in vivid detail...and the subtheme of money and its ultimate power over human destiny permeates the story." Publishers Weekly
Review
"[A]bsorbing...brilliant....As usual, everything Lanchester touches comes miraculously to life....Extraordinarily knowledgeable, ingeniously woven, and powerfully engrossing: a portrait of nothing less than an entire piece of the world and most of a century." Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
"Fragrant Harbor" takes the reader from the intrigue and double-dealing of the 1930s through the savagery of the Japanese occupation to contemporary Hong Kong. The result is a novel that proves Lanchester is a versatile and talented contemporary novelist.
About the Author
John Lanchester born in Hamburg, raised in the Far East, educated at Oxford was a football reporter, an obituary writer, book editor, and restaurant reviewer before turning to fiction. His first novel, The Debt to Pleasure, a bestseller, won four literary prizes, including the Whitbred and Hawthornden. He writes regularly for The London Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker.
"[A] suspenseful and poignant triumph of storytelling and an atmospheric portrait of a fabled city....Lanchester steeps the narrative in vivid detail...and the subtheme of money and its ultimate power over human destiny permeates the story." Publishers Weekly
Review
"[A]bsorbing...brilliant....As usual, everything Lanchester touches comes miraculously to life....Extraordinarily knowledgeable, ingeniously woven, and powerfully engrossing: a portrait of nothing less than an entire piece of the world and most of a century." Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
"Fragrant Harbor" takes the reader from the intrigue and double-dealing of the 1930s through the savagery of the Japanese occupation to contemporary Hong Kong. The result is a novel that proves Lanchester is a versatile and talented contemporary novelist.
About the Author
John Lanchester born in Hamburg, raised in the Far East, educated at Oxford was a football reporter, an obituary writer, book editor, and restaurant reviewer before turning to fiction. His first novel, The Debt to Pleasure, a bestseller, won four literary prizes, including the Whitbred and Hawthornden. He writes regularly for The London Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker.
Biblio Notes
Genre/Form: Fiction
Material Type: Fiction
Document Type: Book
All Authors / Contributors: John Lanchester
ISBN: 0399148663 9780399148668
OCLC Number: 611408045
Description: 342 Seiten.
Series Title: A Marian Wood book
Responsibility: John Lanchester.
Number of Copies
1
