Lightning on the Sun: A Novel - Softcover

Bingham, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385488688 ISBN 13: 9780385488686

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2001

Synopsis

From the highly acclaimed author of Pure Slaughter Value comes this latter-day literary noir about an ex-pat in Cambodia eager to get home but taking all the wrong turns.

Asher went to Cambodia to get away from Julie, his Harvard grad ex-girlfriend currently tending bar in a topless joint in New York. But when his UNESCO work cleaning bat dung from Khmer statues is finished, and he decides on a dicey heroin scheme as his means to get home with plenty of money to spare, it's Julie whose help he solicits. She agrees, but plans go dangerously awry frighteningly fast. A pulsating plot and precise literary prose make Lightning on the Sun a startlingly compelling and strangely poetic tale.

About this title

Review:

"[A] smart, stinging literary thriller reminiscent of Graham Greene and Robert Stone."-San Francisco Chronicle

"[A] gripping literary thriller.... Bingham effortlessly builds suspense."-Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"A powerful story about desire, greed, and the hope for redemption in a fallen world."-Alan Cheuse

From the Back Cover:

Asher is in trouble. He's washed up in Phnom Penh, the UNESCO monument preservation work has dried up, and he's at the end of his spiritual and financial ropes. But highest-quality heroin is wonderfully cheap in this dangerous and corrupt part of the world.

So with funds borrowed from the loan-sharking massage parlour owner Mr. Hawk and the aid of a journalist and 'citizen' Reese as an unwitting mule, he plans to move some weight to New York, where supply will happily meet demand.

His partner in this plan is Julie, his once and future love, a beautiful Harvard-educated dabbler in trendy nihilism and fashionable marginalisation, currently working behind the bar at Stopless, a downtown strip club. It's all been carefully worked out, but when Julie decides to improvise, the plans swiftly and dangerously unravel in ways that will put the lives of these three complexly flawed young Americans in mortal danger.

Robert Bingham's Lightning on the Sun is a beautifully plotted and written novel with the fast-paced suspense of a thriller and the moral resonance and exotic setting of one of Graham Greene's classic works. The novel's sense of place, whether steamy Phnom Penh, or bustling New York or a leafy New England prep school, is unerring, as is its sense of post-modern moral compromise and the disillusioning ways of the world. It offers an exhilarating read; the literary legacy of one of his generation's most gifted writers.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0385488688
• ISBN 13: 9780385488686
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304