On Java Road

March 1, 2022

After two decades in Hong Kong, ex-pat English journalist Adrian Gyle is just bumping along, bored and disaffected. Then the streets startle into violence as pro-democracy demonstrations gather strength, and the death of a young protester named Rebecca--the girlfriend of one of Adrian's oldest buddies--compels him to investigate. From the classy writer of multiple New York Times Notable Books, most recently The Glass Kingdom.

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June 6, 2022
This winning mystery from Osborne (Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel) centers on Adrian Gyle, an English journalist who, after two decades living and working in Hong Kong, has reconciled himself to his career having plateaued and to being known “vaguely as a writer of something or other, and a fairly infamous glutton, but little more than that.” Adrian flashes back to memories of the beginning and development of his closest and longest relationship. While at Clare College, Cambridge, he became close with Jimmy Tang, whose family was among Hong Kong’s wealthiest and most influential. Their paths cross again when, during demonstrations against Beijing’s policies, one of the protestors, Rebecca To, a student to whom Jimmy once introduced Adrian, disappears. With foul play suspected, Adrian turns detective to try to learn Rebecca’s fate. 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. Agent: Adam Eaglin, Elyse Cheney Agency.

July 1, 2022
An atmospheric thriller set in a Hong Kong convulsed by student protests and China's heavy-handed response to them circa 2019. Adrian Gyle is a veteran British reporter, a 20-year resident of Hong Kong who has access to the city's elites thanks to the charming, reckless Jimmy Tang, his old university friend. The plot revolves around the disappearance of a young woman Adrian meets through Jimmy; she's both a child of wealth and influence and a fearless frontline street protester (her legs bear splotches from the blue dye authorities fire from water cannons to disperse and identify activists). But to call this a mystery may mislead a bit. The book is like a whodunit turned inside out, with what might usually be background--the precisely and evocatively drawn setting, especially--at center and the plot mostly crowding in around the edges. 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. He captures, too, Gyle's feeling of wistful alienhood, the jadedness that approaches but never quite gets to cynicism. Some of the detail--especially about fashion, food, and drink--does pall a bit, but Osborne's strategy is mostly successful: The reader senses early on that the disappearance, like the larger mystery it's embedded in, the case of Hong Kong's fate, won't--can't--have a simple solution. Decisive conclusions, it seems implied, require an arrogance like that Tacitus referred to (Osborne quotes it here) when he wrote about invaders who "make a desert and call it peace." Solutions belong only to those who can ruthlessly enforce them, and the reader--like the battered-from-all-sides Gyle and like the ordinary residents of Hong Kong--can have no illusions about that. Moody and compelling.

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