Adolph Ng, an effete, Canadian-educated hotel owner of Chinese origin, leads a placid existence on Danu, the eastern half of an island to the north of Australia.
Timothy Mo’s sweeping historical novel is set on the China coast in the 1830s, before and during the 19th-century Opium Wars.
In 1833, Walter Eastman and Gideon Chase, young Americans working in the ‘Factories’ - the home of the East India Company on the south China coast - are at loggerheads with the European community which thrives on the opium trade. When Eastman is fired, he and Chase establish an irreverent weekly paper, which shows a flamboyance and crusading zeal. When the first Opium War breaks out their lives grow increasingly dangerous.
Timothy Mo
About the Author
Timothy Peter Mo was born in Hong Kong. Three of his novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.Other nominated books by Timothy Mo
Timothy Mo’s deft portrayal of London’s Chinatown in the 1960s, where a thriving community lives by its own precise and violent rules.
