Summary and Reviews of Fragrant Harbor by John Lanchester

Media Reviews

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution In his rich, bold new novel, Fragrant Harbor, Lanchester has done it again, bringing his singular narrative ease to a historical story that sniffs of a quiet, personalized epic, but does so beautifully . . .His sentences glide across the page with a leisure that disguises their deeper significance. Into all of this luxuriant language Lanchester sneaks in sly humor, moral dilemmas and tightly wound universal emotions.

The New York Times Book Review Fragrant Harbor is not an enormous novel, but it feels like one - it is bursting with ideas. Lanchester takes on almost every major theme and succeeds with most of them: race, class, love, war, the fall of rulers and the rise of the ruled. The novels sharpest insights are into the nature of success, its best passages careful dissections of how a disenfranchised community of poor refugees turned the colony into one of the richest societies in the world.

The New York Post John Lanchester delivers his third impressive novel in a row . . . a robust, decades-spanning saga about lovers in Hong Kong.

Booklist - Elsa Gaztambide Lanchester weaves a circular tale of lives that unintentionally intermingle to produce life-changing events, and his vivid descriptions of the city and culture bring them to life for the senses to savor.

Kirkus Reviews Extraordinarily knowledgeable, ingeniously woven, and powerfully engrossing a portrait of nothing less than an entire piece of the world and most of a century.

Publishers Weekly Lanchester's previous, prize-winning novels, The Debt to Pleasure and Mr. Phillips, excelled in cleverness but didn't hint at the depth of feeling and narrative drive that he manifests here.

 Roberta Rubin, The Bookstall at Chestnut Court Lanchester, who wrote the wonderful Debt to Pleasure, has done it again. Set in Hong Kong from 1935 to the present, he follows a man traveling on a ship to start a new life. Add in the story of a young Chinese missionary nun, and there begins a trail of intrigue dealing with crime, money and the Hong Kong undercurrents of modern business. I just loved it.