Review of “Gweilo: A Memoir of a Hong Kong Childhood” – Martin Booth
Just finished reading Martin Booth’s autobiographic book, the third of the Gweilo canon I’ve read these past few months. The three books couldn’t be more different. John Lanchester’s novel Fragrant Harbour covers the period between the end of the first world war and the turn of this century. He skilfully weaves three narrators and three narratives into an intergenerational saga. James Clavell’s Taipan is a swashbuckling story of an early Victorian privateer who outwits mandarins, pirates and business rivals to found an enduring business dynasty that loosely based on the Jardine story. Gweilo is set in the two-year stretch of time between 1952 and […]