Book description
Fragrant Harbour is the story of four people whose intertwined
lives span Asia's last seventy years. Tom Stewart leaves England just
before it is hit by the Great Depression to seek his fortune, and
finds it in running Hong Kong's best hotel. Sister Maria is a
beautiful and uncompromising Chinese nun whom Stewart meets on the
boat out from England; their friendship spans decades and changes both
their lives. Dawn Stone is an English journalist who becomes the
public face of money and power and big business. Matthew Ho is a young
Chinese entrepreneur whose life has been shaped by painful choices
made long before his birth, and who is now facing his own
difficulties, and opportunities, in the twenty-first century. The
complacency of colonial life in the 1930s; the horrors of the Japanese
occupation during the Second World War; the post-war boom and
transformation of Hong Kong into a laboratory of capitalism at its
most cut-throat; the growth of the Triads; the handover of the city to
the Chinese - all these are present in Fragrant Harbour, an epic novel
of one of the world's great cities.
John Lanchester was born in Hamburg in 1962. He was brought up
in the Far East and educated in England. His three novels, The Debt to
Pleasure, Mr Phillips and Fragrant Harbour, have been translated into
more than twenty languages. He is married and lives in London.
