John Lanchester

"It's Hong Kong," she said. "Heung gong. Fragrant harbour." Fragrant Harbour is the story of four people whose intertwined lives span Asia's last seventy years. Tom Stewart leaves England to seek his fortune, and finds it in running Hong Kong's best hotel. Sister Maria is a beautiful and uncompromising Chinese nun whom Stewart meets on the boat. Dawn Stone is...

'Sharp, humorous, satirical . . . a mind-bending collection.' - TLS Household gizmos with a mind of their own. Constant cold calls from unknown numbers. And the creeping suspicion that none of this is real. Reality, and Other Stories is a gathering of deliciously chilling entertainments—stories to be read as the evenings draw in and the days are haunted by...

Have you seen Cheating?Do you think it's as good as everyone says? Better than Succession, White Lotus, Dallas, the Old Testament, Tolstoy?What do you make of the younger girlfriend? Is she really supposed to be as horrible as she seems? Do you think you're supposed to hate the wife? And are you supposed to like the husband? Because I can't...

Masterly... A signal achievement... Remarkable. - Guardian A 1984 for our times. - Daily Express Kavanagh begins his time patrolling the Wall. If he's lucky, if nothing goes wrong, he only has to do two years of this. 729 more nights. The best thing that can happen is that he survives and gets off the Wall and will never have...

The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester is the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award 1996. To like something is to want to ingest it and, in that sense, is to submit to the world; to like something is to succumb, in a small but contentful way, to death. Tarquin Winot—hedonist, food obsessive, ironist and snob—travels a circuitous route...

Pepys Road: an ordinary street in the Capital. Each house has seen its fair share of first steps and last breaths, and plenty of laughter in between. Today, through each letterbox along this ordinary street drops a card with a simple message: We Want What You Have. At forty, Roger Yount is blessed with an expensively groomed wife, two small...

I grew up with a sense that there was another, fuller, darker narrative looming behind the various shorter stories my mother told so well and so funnily. Family Romance is a beautifully written memoir in which John Lanchester pieces together his parents' history, their extraordinary secrets, and the shape of their shared life. From his grandparents' beginnings in rural Ireland...