Fragrant Harbour - Tapa blanda

'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; the growth of the Triads; and the hand over of the city to the Chinese - all these are present in Fragrant Harbour, an epic novel of one of the world’s great cities and John Lanchester’s finest book to date.

John Lanchester was born in 1962 in Hamburg. Before turning to fiction, he led a varied career as a football reporter, obituary writer, book editor, restaurant critic, and deputy editor of the London Review of Books, where his pieces still occasionally appear. He has also contributed to Granta, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker.$$$His first novel, The Debt to Pleasure, appeared in 1996. Translated into twenty-two languages, it won four literary awards (including the coveted Whitbread First Novel Award and Hawthornden), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award (the only American book prize then open to a non-North American), shortlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Award, and longlisted for the Booker Prize. It appeared on bestseller lists around the country, and also made many of the annual notable book lists.$$$John Lanchester's second novel, Mr Phillips, was published by Faber in January 2000 to great acclaim. His third novel, Fragrant Harbour, published in 2002, is an epic novel of one of the world's great cities. John Lanchester's connections with Hong Kong date back to the 1930s, when his grandparents arrived there looking for work. They spent the war years locked up in Stanley Internment Camp. Lanchester himself first went to Hong Kong when he was six-weeks-old, and lived there until 1980.$$$$$$John Lanchester is married and lives in London.