Shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 1982
Timothy Mo’s deft portrayal of London’s Chinatown in the 1960s, where a thriving community lives by its own precise and violent rules.
At the centre of 1960s London, the Chinese community flourishes like a spiky, brilliant crystal garden in the murky waters of Soho. Pitched into an alien city, which is neither hostile nor friendly but very strange and very foreign, the Chen family prospers by skilfully, and sometimes incongruously, blending tradition and opportunity. But no private family lives beyond the reach of the largest and most powerful Chinese ‘family’ - the Triad.
Sour Sweet by Timothy Mo
Timothy Mo was born in Hong Kong in 1950 to a Cantonese father and an English mother. He was educated in Hong Kong and England. After graduating from St John's College, Oxford, he worked as a journalist for the New Statesman and Boxing News. With Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro, Timothy Mo emerged in the 1980s as one of the most important novelists writing about bi-cultural diversity, reflecting both his Anglo-Chinese background and his concerns for the effects of imperialism and colonial rule in South-East Asia. His first novel, The Monkey King (1978), set in Hong Kong, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. His next three novels were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction: Sour Sweet (1982), the story of a Chinese immigrant family living in London, winner of the Hawthornden Prize; An Insular Possession (1986), set during the Opium Wars between Britain and China in the first half of the nineteenth century; and The Redundancy of Courage (1991), a fictional account of Indonesia's annexation of East Timor in 1976. Sour Sweet was adapted as a film in 1988 with a screenplay by Ian McEwan. Mo has published his two most recent books himself. Both are set in the Philippines: Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard (1995), set during an academic conference, a satire of cultural and imperial domination, while Renegade or Halo2 (1999) describes the adventures of Rey Archimedes Blondel Castro, the son of an American G.I. and a Filipina bar-girl. Renegade or Halo2 was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction).
His next book, Pure (2012), was published over a decade later , the heroine of which is a Bangkok lady boy who joins a company of Islamist warriors.
Format: Paperback / softback 288 pages
Publisher: Paddleless Press
Imprint: Paddleless Press
Edition: New ed
ISBN: 9780952419327
Published: 4 Aug 1999Weight: 242g
Dimensions: 127 x 142 x 7 (mm)