The Ballad of a Small Player
Lawrence Osborne
SOON TO BE A MAJOR NETFLIX FILM, STARRING COLIN FARELL AND TILDA SWINTON
‘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.
Product Details
About Lawrence Osborne
Reviews for The Ballad of a Small Player
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
A searing portrait of addiction and despair set in the glittering world of Macau’s casinos.... the novel’s energetic portrait of the highs and lows of a gambler’s fortunes are as good as anything in the literature of addiction. Osborne’s intriguing Chinese milieu and exquisite prose mark this work as a standout.
Starred review
Publisher's Weekly
With its ex-pat angst and debauched air of moral ambiguity set amid the sinister demi-monde of the Far East’s corrupt gambling dens, Osborne’s darkly introspective study of decline and decay conjures apt comparisons to Paul Bowles, Graham Greene, and V. S. Naipaul.
Booklist
The beauty of this novel is in the elegance and precision of its prose, which renders the glaring kitsch of Macau into a series of exquisite miniatures, and draws on Osborne's reserves as a travel writer.
Gerard Woodward
Guardian
Lawrence Osborne’s latest will leave you breathless… [It] will screw up your guts with anxiety, fill you with hope and then kick you hard in the b
cks all in one well-weighted read. No need to gamble
it's an absolute winner of a book.
Jon Wise
Weekend Sport
A brisk, electrifying read, as elegant in negotiating the rackety world it depicts as its bow-tied narrator
Rachel Cooke
Observer