Fragrant Harbour - Softcover

Lanchester, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571294855 ISBN 13: 9780571294855

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2013

Synopsis

'It's Hong Kong,' she said. 'Heung gong. Fragrant harbour.'

Fragrant Harbour is the story of four people whose intertwined lives span Asia's last seventy years. Tom Stewart leaves England 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. 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.

The complacency of colonial life in the 1930s; the horrors of the Japanese occupation during the Second World War; the post-war boom and 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.

About this title

Review:

In his new novel Fragrant Harbour John Lanchester, as in his previous books, shows an impressionist's gift for adopting different voices for his narrator. The moral hedonist Tarquin Winot who tells his story in The Debt to Pleasure and the downsized suburbanite whose inner monologues provide the material for Mr Phillips could hardly be more contrasting characters, yet Lanchester makes both equally convincing.

In Fragrant Harbour much of the story is told in the words of Tom Stewart, a young Englishman who sails to Hong Kong in the 1930s and ends up spending the rest of his long life there. The voice of Stewart--reserved, humane and understated--is as finely achieved as those in the earlier novels. Through his eyes we see Hong Kong's 20th-century history. The class-ridden and racially divided society of the 1930s is given the brutal awakening of the Japanese occupation. After the war, the old Hong Kong disappears and the city is transformed by economic boom and entrepreneurial energy. The approaching return of the city to mainland China brings its own problems, anxieties and upheavals.

Against this backdrop, Stewart's life, and particularly his relationship with Maria, a Chinese nun he first meets as he is travelling out from England in 1935, unfolds. Lanchester intertwines personal histories and the city's history with great skill, showing how the past lives on, even in a city as resolutely modern as Hong Kong. The narrator of the book's last section, a young businessman called Matthew Ho, may be the embodiment of the new Hong Kong but, as he knows himself, his life has been decisively marked by the old. --Nick Rennison

Review:

"Lanchester makes Hong Kong so fascinating. What he has to say about the city is complex and thoughtful and has all the makings of a great, epie story."

"A lovely, intelligent, and beguiling book." (Jonathan Yardley, "The Washington Post Book World")

"Lanchester makes Hong Kong so fascinating. What he has to say about the city is complex and thoughtful and has all the makings of a great, epic story." ("San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle")

-An ambitious novel . . . Mr. Lanchester succeeds in fusing the epic with the individual.- (The New York Times)
-A lovely, intelligent, and beguiling book.- (Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World)
-Lanchester makes Hong Kong so fascinating. What he has to say about the city is complex and thoughtful and has all the makings of a great, epic story.- (San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle)

"An ambitious novel . . . Mr. Lanchester succeeds in fusing the epic with the individual." (The New York Times)

"A lovely, intelligent, and beguiling book." (Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World)

"Lanchester makes Hong Kong so fascinating. What he has to say about the city is complex and thoughtful and has all the makings of a great, epic story." (San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle)

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0571294855
• ISBN 13: 9780571294855
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320