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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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ON JAVA ROAD

Lawrence Osborne

ON JAVA ROAD is both a wry, ominously slippery mystery and a gripping portrait of a city swallowed by unrest. Osborne brings readers right into the turbulent streets of Hong Kong as we follow a jaded British reporter obsessed with uncovering the secrets behind the disappearance of a student protester. But it also tells the story of a vanishing city, and a man between cultures, as the old world breaks to a new dawn.
After twenty years as a journalist in Hong Kong, ex-pat Englishman Adrian Gyle has very little to show for it. Evenings are whiled away with soup dumplings and tea at Fung Shing, the restaurant downstairs from his home on Java Road, that "most melancholy street in the city, the street where the dead congregated." It is through these jaded eyes that Gyle watches the city around him - once overflowing with wine dinners and private members' clubs - erupt in violence as pro-democracy demonstrations hit ever closer to home.

Just as Gyle prepares to turn his back on this city, he finds one last intrigue: the alluring Rebecca, the new girlfriend of one of his oldest friends, and a student involved in the protests. When her body mysteriously turns up in the local morgue, Gyle finds that old familiar urge to investigate and as he pieces together Rebecca's final days and hours, Gyle must tread carefully through a newly volatile and dangerous place.

Lawrence Osborne is the author of seven critically acclaimed novels, including THE GLASS KINGDOM (a New York Times Notable Book, and Editor's Choice), THE FORGIVEN (now a movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain), BEAUTIFUL ANIMALS (was a front cover review of the New York Times Book Review) and ONLY TO SLEEP: A Philip Marlowe Novel (nominated for an Edgar Award and named as a best book of the year by The New York Times Book Review), plus six books of nonfiction, including BANGKOK DAYS. Lawrence Osborne fans include Lionel Shriver, Lee Child, Hilary Mantel, Deborah Levy, Katie Kitamura, and the critic Dwight Garner. He has led a nomadic life, living in Paris, New York, Mexico, and Istanbul, and he currently resides in Bangkok.
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Published 2022-08-02 by Hogarth

Comments

A highly distinctive writer who quickly becomes addictive.

A master of the high style.

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.

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

A compulsive novel about duplicity, oppression and wealthy playboys in modern Hong Kong... For me place is everything," Osborne has said and, in a remarkable spate of novels since The Forgiven (2012), he has dazzlingly displayed his forte for evoking it. Read more...

An engaging mystery... Osborne tells a riveting and neatly unnerving story that brilliantly conveys "a period of sacred madness. Read more...

Osborne's writing luxuriates in elsewheres - filled with poetic descriptions that evoke shifts in wind patterns, shadows on Mediterranean surf, gliding light across desert sands. The grandeur of those settings is deliciously juxtaposed with the foolishness and darkness of his characters... In the growing footprint of what he deems "Planet Tourism," his novels have become his radical reworking of travel writing - as sensual, provocative and riveting portraits of lives and places in flux.

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. Read more...

UK: Hogarth UK ; Dutch: Prometheus ; Italian: Adelphi

Lawrence Osborne's novels are easy to admire. Osborne is an ambitious novelist and this is more than just a story about courage in Hong Kong... Osborne is too clever a writer to reach a conclusion but the overall effect of this timely, elegantly written novel is unsettling and concerning. Read more...

Osborne's writing is uncomfortably well observed; his story is sickeningly, addictively headlong.

A startlingly good observer of privilege, noting the rites and rituals of the upper classes with unerring precision and an undercurrent of malice.

But human nature and atmosphere will always interest Osborne more than the traditional pyrotechnics of a thriller. The palpable sense of dread that hovers over Hong Kong and Osborne's exploration of Adrian's own moral conundrum is what kept me turning the pages... Once again, Osborne skillfully - and with exquisite prose - probes the nexus of community and character, and how where we are shapes who we are. Read more...

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.