On Java Road
After twenty years as an ex-pat reporter in Hong Kong, Adrian Gyle has almost nothing to show for it. But now the streets are choked with students demanding democratic freedoms, and the old world is beginning to fall apart.
Adrian's old friend Jimmy Tang, the scion of a wealthy Hong Kong family, has begun a reckless affair with Rebecca, a leading pro-democracy protestor. But when Rebecca disappears and Jimmy goes to ground, Adrian unearths the familiar old urge to investigate. Pursuing Rebecca's ghost to Java Road where the city's dead congregate, Adrian re-assembles her final hours - as he struggles to distinguish between delusion and reality.
'Osborne's whodunnit is wrapped in an atmospheric portrait both of a particular place and time, and of the creation and destruction of a friendship. Highly recommended' GUARDIAN
'Osborne goes from strength to strength' LIONEL SHRIVER
'Osborne handles surface and depth with immense skill, as only great writers can' DEBORAH LEVY, FINANCIAL TIMES
'If the purpose of a novel is to take you away from the everyday and show you something different, then Osborne is succeeding, and handsomely' LEE CHILD, NEW YORK TIMES
Review: [A] superbly atmospheric reportage of a place and time... [On Java Road is] his most compulsive yet -- Peter Kemp * Sunday Times *
Marvellously convincing evocations of fractious, tear-gas-canister-strewn Hong Kong... Osborne...presents every country his novels visit clearly, without imposing his own gloss * Literary Review *
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 * Washington Post *
Masterly ... This story of moral failings and totalitarian excess is as disturbing as it is irresistible -- Peter Carty * i *
Osborne's whodunnit is wrapped in an atmospheric portrait both of a particular place and time, and of the creation and destruction of a friendship. Highly recommended * Guardian *