The Ballad of a Small Player by Lawrence Osborne

The Ballad of a Small Player by Lawrence Osborne

‘I waited patiently for the next hand to be played out, and I had a feeling it was going to be a Natural, a perfect nine.’ His name is Lord Doyle. His plan: to gamble away his last days in the dark and decadent casino halls of Macau. His game: baccarat punto blanco -- 'that slutty dirty queen of casino card games.' Though Doyle is not a Lord at all. He is a fake; a corrupt lawyer who has spent a career siphoning money from rich clients. And now he is on the run, determined to send the money – and himself – up in smoke. So begins a beguiling, elliptical velvet rope of a plot: a sharp suit, yellow kid gloves, another naughty lemonade and an endless loop of small wins and losses. When Lady Luck arrives in the form of Dao-Ming, a beautiful yet enigmatic lost soul, so begins a spectacular and unnatural winning streak in which millions come Doyle’s way. But in these shadowy dens of risk and compulsion, in a land governed by superstition, Doyle knows that when the bets are high, the stakes are even greater. The Ballad of a Small Player is a sleek, dark-hearted masterpiece: a ghost story set in the land of the living, and a decadent morality tale of a Faustian pact made, not with the devil, but with fortune’s fickle hand.

A modern Graham Greene... into this relatively quiet period for British fiction, someone remarkable and unexpected has emerged fully armed with a formidable, masterly grip on the British novel. At precisely the point where most novelists start to show signs of flagging, Osborne has hit his creative, fictional stride...and has arrived as a thrilling, exceptional talent in British fiction's landscape. -- Robert Collins * Sunday Times *
A perfectly written existential thriller, a spooky, gripping, heart-in-your-mouth read that has profound things to say about the only god who rules human affairs – chance. -- Neel Mukherjee * New Statesman, Books of the Year 2014 *
Damn. Another writer I have to care about… dark, brilliant and about as ignorable as a switchblade. * New York Times *
The Ballad of a Small Player shares the exoticism and East-West disconnect of The Quiet American, the unresolved supernaturalism of The Heart of the Matter and Loser Takes All's bittersweet relationship with the gaming tables. If Osborne's book is a love letter to gambling, it's the kind written at 3am to an indifferent ex after an evening at the bar -- an ode to self-destruction. A brisk, electrifying read... the most ambiguous, and therefore the most enjoyable, kind of ghost story. The Ballad of a Small Player remains elusive, and is all the better for that. -- Adrian Turpin * Literary Review *
Hypnotic, razor-sharp in its insights, compelling... in Osborne's hands, the moments of suspense are handled with so much skill that we sometimes read them more as memoir than elements of a thriller. -- Tash Aw * NPR *

Born in England, Lawrence Osborne is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Forgiven, The Ballad of a Small Player, Hunters in the Dark, Beautiful Animals, Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe novel (commissioned by the Raymond Chandler estate) and The Glass Kingdom. His non-fiction ranges from memoir through travelogue to essays, including Bangkok Days, Paris Dreambook and The Wet and the Dry. His short story 'Volcano' was selected for Best American Short Stories 2012. The Forgiven is currently being filmed in Morocco, starring Ralph Fiennes, Matt Smith and Jessica Chastain, and is due for release in 2021; Hunters in the Dark will shoot in Cambodia in 2021 with Aneurin Barnard, Adam Pettyfer and Tzi Ma; and Beautiful Animals is now in production with Amazon. Osborne lives in Bangkok.


www.lawrenceosborne.net

SKU	Non disponible
ISBN 13	9781781090169
ISBN 10	1781090165
Titre	The Ballad of a Small Player
Auteur	Lawrence Osborne
État	Non disponible
Type de reliure	Hardback
Éditeur	Vintage Publishing
Année de publication	2014-04-03
Nombre de pages	224
Prix	Long-listed for The Folio Prize 2015 (UK)
Note de couverture	La photo du livre est présentée à titre d'illustration uniquement. La reliure, la couverture ou l'édition réelle peuvent varier.
Note	Non disponible