On Java Road

One

I thought, in those desperate and forgotten days, of that passage in a novel I had read in school where the narrator insists that he prefers to be known as a reporter rather than as a journalist, the humbler word better denoting what he does, namely transcribing what he sees. Today it s an even less dishonorable job description. I knew all the journalists in Hong Kong, of course, but I also knew a fair number of the reporters the citizens trailing the city s movable war zones, often like me all alone with a phone camera, and over time I had become more comfortable among them without consciously knowing why. But then what were we describing and for whom? I wasn t sure about that either. For myself, perhaps, and a few others scattered across the globe, such as I liked to imagine them, it would depend how deep you wanted to go into yourself. Some of these reporters had become strangely famous.

They were unlike me in that respect. Although I had been in Hong Kong for more than twenty years, slaving away as a reporter factotum gradually persevering his way into higher echelons of respectability, I had never made a name for myself in my adopted city. People knew me vaguely as a writer of something or other, and a fairly infamous glutton, but little more than that. I had gone there when still a young man, chilled to the marrow by London and its prospects and, more important, unable to see myself succeeding in that tomb of a city. I had arrived in Hong Kong just after the Handover, knowing nobody except my old university friend Jimmy Tang, and equipped only with a single suitcase and savings of five thousand sterling. I had done well given those inauspicious beginnings, but I had never become a star writer. And in a way I didn t mind at all. I had worked for a variety of newspapers, enjoyed a stint as a restaurant critic, married and divorced, accumulated a small apartment, and perfected the Chinese I had studied at university. In other words, I was an

Lawrence Osborne

Osborne is the bard of modern-day expat noir, and in On Java Road he s outdone himself, packing the usual preoccupations (estrangement, existential ennui, spiritual restlessness) in unceasingly compelling surroundings: Hong Kong in tumult . . . [bringing] together a story of privilege, wealth, passion, and loyalty, while also providing incisive cultural insights and full-blooded characters. Osborne s prose is as precise and observant as ever, and On Java Road is a novel that will leave readers shaken long after they ve finished reading. CrimeReads

This winning mystery from Osborne . . . makes a city beset by unrest, countered by harsh repression, feel palpable, and the dynamic between two college friends of different socioeconomic backgrounds will remind many of Brideshead Revisited. Those patient enough to wait for the mystery plotline to kick in will be rewarded. Publishers Weekly

An atmospheric thriller set in a Hong Kong convulsed by student protests . . . The book is like a whodunit turned inside out. . . . Hong Kong comes fiercely alive on the page, and Osborne s command of complex history, geography, and politics (and poetry) is nuanced and sure-handed. . . . Moody and compelling. Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Lawrence Osborne

A startlingly good observer of privilege, noting the rites and rituals of the upper classes with unerring precision and an undercurrent of malice. Katie Kitamura, The New York Times Book Review

Unites Graham Greene s fondness for foreign soil with Patricia Highsmith s fascination with the nastier coils of the human psyche . . . What makes Osborne s work so compelling is that it s ruthlessly unpredictable. NPR

Mr. Osborne has a keen and sometimes cruel eye for humans and their manners and morals. . . . Surprising and dark and excellent. The New York Times