Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
A Mariner Book, Houghton Mifflin Company
Description
When Mr Hung offers Bunt a handsome sum for the family business, he refuses him immediately. Yet it soon grows clear that Mr Hung will accept no refusals. Then a woman from Bunt's factory vanishes and he is forced for the first time in his life to make decisions that matter.
Media reviews
Kirkus
This hybrid story is infused with a powerful sense of menace (and an unfortunate whiff of racism) and manages a doggedly convincing characterization of its complex protagonist. But there are several long stretches during which nothing much happens, and Theroux overindulges a penchant for lengthy
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summaries in place of developed scenes. As a result, the book feels uneven, and sometimes hurried. A strongly imagined melodrama with a lot on its mind, but not the novel it might have been. Show Less
Subjects
Awards
Dublin Literary Award (Longlist — 1999)
Original publication date
1997
Call number
LIT.THP.KOT
Library's review
Paul Theroux, whose inveterate globe-trotting marks him as one of the most restless writers working today, lands us in the Far East with this novel of personal lives swept up in the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China. But the end of Colonial rule is perfectly unwelcome for Neville Mullard
(Abstract source: http://www.amazon.com/Kowloon-Tong-Paul-Theroux/dp/0395860296)
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and his mother Betty, who run a textile factory that's been in the family for 50 years, and who have spent a lifetime insulating themselves from the Chinese culture that's all around them. Now, the shadowy and dangerous Mr. Hung wants to buy the business, and he won't take no for an answer--whether or not the Mullards want to sell. Theroux, the author of several travel books, has few equals when it comes to the portrayal of exotic cultures, a skill that makes this one of the first great novels of the Hong Kong handover of 1997.(Abstract source: http://www.amazon.com/Kowloon-Tong-Paul-Theroux/dp/0395860296)
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Pages
247