Thrillers & Suspense
![Lawrence Osborne - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_a_lawrence_osborne.jpg)
On Java Road: A Novel
A veteran journalist in Hong Kong is caught in a shadowy web of truth and betrayal as he investigates the disappearance of a student protester in this menacing, atmospheric novel written with "shades of Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith" (Sunday Times) from the celebrated author of The Forgiven-now a major motion picture starring Jessica Chastain and Ralph Fiennes.
"Osborne is 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, on Beautiful Animals
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022-CrimeReads, Fodors
After two decades 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, watching the city-once overflowing with wine dinners and private members' clubs-erupt in violence as pro-democracy demonstrations hit ever closer to home.
Watching from the skyrises is Adrian's old friend Jimmy Tang, the scion of one of Hong Kong's wealthiest families. Just as Gyle prepares to turn his back on Hong Kong, he finds one last intrigue: the mysterious Rebecca, a student involved in the protests, and the latest of Jimmy's reckless dalliances. But when Rebecca goes missing and Jimmy hides, Gyle feels that old familiar urge to investigate.
Piecing together Rebecca's final days and hours, Gyle must tread carefully through a volatile world of friendship and betrayal where personal loyalties vanish like the city he once knew so well. On Java Road tells the story of a man between the fault lines of old worlds and new orders in pursuit of the truth.
"Osborne is 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, on Beautiful Animals
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022-CrimeReads, Fodors
After two decades 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, watching the city-once overflowing with wine dinners and private members' clubs-erupt in violence as pro-democracy demonstrations hit ever closer to home.
Watching from the skyrises is Adrian's old friend Jimmy Tang, the scion of one of Hong Kong's wealthiest families. Just as Gyle prepares to turn his back on Hong Kong, he finds one last intrigue: the mysterious Rebecca, a student involved in the protests, and the latest of Jimmy's reckless dalliances. But when Rebecca goes missing and Jimmy hides, Gyle feels that old familiar urge to investigate.
Piecing together Rebecca's final days and hours, Gyle must tread carefully through a volatile world of friendship and betrayal where personal loyalties vanish like the city he once knew so well. On Java Road tells the story of a man between the fault lines of old worlds and new orders in pursuit of the truth.
Editorial Reviews
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 excellent nonentity.
In fact, at the beginning of that summer, when the disturbances had first erupted, I felt as though I were being woken from a deep and meaningless sleep. The city I had grown so used to-comfortable, cynical, overflowing with wine dinners and white-truffle events-was shattered the first moment I saw one of my neighbors wander onto Java Road at midnight in a white sleeveless shirt wielding a butcher's knife. I knew the man by face if not by name because I saw him every other day at Fung Shing, the restaurant on that same Java Road where I spent much of my time drinking tea with guan tang jiao soupy dumplings and editing my reports. I think he recognized me, too, but I was invisible to him in that moment on the street at midnight because he was there looking for protestors...
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 excellent nonentity.
In fact, at the beginning of that summer, when the disturbances had first erupted, I felt as though I were being woken from a deep and meaningless sleep. The city I had grown so used to-comfortable, cynical, overflowing with wine dinners and white-truffle events-was shattered the first moment I saw one of my neighbors wander onto Java Road at midnight in a white sleeveless shirt wielding a butcher's knife. I knew the man by face if not by name because I saw him every other day at Fung Shing, the restaurant on that same Java Road where I spent much of my time drinking tea with guan tang jiao soupy dumplings and editing my reports. I think he recognized me, too, but I was invisible to him in that moment on the street at midnight because he was there looking for protestors...
Short Excerpt Teaser
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 excellent nonentity.
In fact, at the beginning of that summer, when the disturbances had first erupted, I felt as though I were being woken from a deep and meaningless sleep. The city I had grown so used to-comfortable, cynical, overflowing with wine dinners and white-truffle events-was shattered the first moment I saw one of my neighbors wander onto Java Road at midnight in a white sleeveless shirt wielding a butcher's knife. I knew the man by face if not by name because I saw him every other day at Fung Shing, the restaurant on that same Java Road where I spent much of my time drinking tea with guan tang jiao soupy dumplings and editing my reports. I think he recognized me, too, but I was invisible to him in that moment on the street at midnight because he was there looking for protestors to intimidate, and a Chinese civil war doesn't automatically include European drifters.
Later, it was true, certain expatriated foreigners would indeed become local heroes in the conflict that consumed the city that summer, like the Frenchman with no legs who declared his solidarity with the students while standing precariously on his prostheses and orating to thrilling effect. I never found out his name, though I was resolved to buy him a drink if I ever saw him eating alone in a cheap restaurant. He was known merely as the Frenchman with No Legs. As for the fellow knife-wielding diner at Fung Shing, I never knew his name either, but he would reappear like the ghost in a folk tale, never losing his power to disquiet.
He was one of the countless Fujianese immigrants concentrated in North Point, the neighborhood where I lived, which had long been a bastion of pro-Beijing nationalist sentiment. Still speaking Mandarin instead of Cantonese, they were an island among the sea of Hong Kongers who otherwise barely noticed them. Their moment of vindicating the Motherland had come, and when they achieved critical mass-as for example at Fung Shing at about 9 p.m.-they acquired a belligerent confidence even as they were huddled around pots of tea and after-dinner doughnuts, a delicacy carried from table to table on sugary trays after the main courses had been served. Since they regarded foreigners with suspicion at the best of times, and now associated us with the demonic prospect of democracy, I wondered if they, and he, were now my enemy. And even if they had drawn no blood from me personally, how should I report and describe them? This question made me want to eat at Fung Shing every single night. Besides, the very name in English, Phoenix City, now seemed more apposite than it had before. Another phoenix, another riddle.
Every time I climbed up the staircase to the second-floor eatery, which was level with its red-and-blue street sign, past a regal go...
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 excellent nonentity.
In fact, at the beginning of that summer, when the disturbances had first erupted, I felt as though I were being woken from a deep and meaningless sleep. The city I had grown so used to-comfortable, cynical, overflowing with wine dinners and white-truffle events-was shattered the first moment I saw one of my neighbors wander onto Java Road at midnight in a white sleeveless shirt wielding a butcher's knife. I knew the man by face if not by name because I saw him every other day at Fung Shing, the restaurant on that same Java Road where I spent much of my time drinking tea with guan tang jiao soupy dumplings and editing my reports. I think he recognized me, too, but I was invisible to him in that moment on the street at midnight because he was there looking for protestors to intimidate, and a Chinese civil war doesn't automatically include European drifters.
Later, it was true, certain expatriated foreigners would indeed become local heroes in the conflict that consumed the city that summer, like the Frenchman with no legs who declared his solidarity with the students while standing precariously on his prostheses and orating to thrilling effect. I never found out his name, though I was resolved to buy him a drink if I ever saw him eating alone in a cheap restaurant. He was known merely as the Frenchman with No Legs. As for the fellow knife-wielding diner at Fung Shing, I never knew his name either, but he would reappear like the ghost in a folk tale, never losing his power to disquiet.
He was one of the countless Fujianese immigrants concentrated in North Point, the neighborhood where I lived, which had long been a bastion of pro-Beijing nationalist sentiment. Still speaking Mandarin instead of Cantonese, they were an island among the sea of Hong Kongers who otherwise barely noticed them. Their moment of vindicating the Motherland had come, and when they achieved critical mass-as for example at Fung Shing at about 9 p.m.-they acquired a belligerent confidence even as they were huddled around pots of tea and after-dinner doughnuts, a delicacy carried from table to table on sugary trays after the main courses had been served. Since they regarded foreigners with suspicion at the best of times, and now associated us with the demonic prospect of democracy, I wondered if they, and he, were now my enemy. And even if they had drawn no blood from me personally, how should I report and describe them? This question made me want to eat at Fung Shing every single night. Besides, the very name in English, Phoenix City, now seemed more apposite than it had before. Another phoenix, another riddle.
Every time I climbed up the staircase to the second-floor eatery, which was level with its red-and-blue street sign, past a regal go...
