The Forgiven
“Once in a while, a novel comes along that has the slender, ripped body of sharp, exquisitely constructed literary fiction and the quicksilver, pumping mind of a slinky, gut-jabbing thriller. That novel, this year, is Lawrence Osborne’s The Forgiven…into this relatively quiet period for British fiction, someone remarkable and unexpected — lingering between the shadowy, post-colonial penumbra of Greene and the brave new horizons of a globalised world — has emerged fully armed with a formidable, masterly grip on the British novel.”
- Robert Collins, The Sunday Times
Selected by The Economist as one of the Best Books of the Year 2012
Selected by Library Journal as one of the Year's Best Books 2012
Year's Best Books Chosen by Writers, selected by Lionel Shriver, The Guardian 2012
“A sinister and streamlined entertainment in the tradition of Paul Bowles, Evelyn Waugh and the early Ian McEwan….This is a lean book that moves like a panther. Even better, Mr. Osborne has a keen and sometimes cruel eye for humans and their manners and morals, and for the natural world. You can open to almost any page and find brutally fine observations….surprising and dark and excellent.”
—New York Times
“The Forgiven shines darkly with a rich and mordant fatalism. Osborne's characters emerge like people in a dream – diamond-sharp but fascinatingly askew. His prose is gorgeous and precise; the story slices keenly through the exotic haze of its setting. It's an absolutely brilliant novel – the ending is a shock in the best way.”
— Kate Christensen, author of The Epicure's Lament and The Astral
“A perfect storm of a novel”
-Fredericksburg Freelance Star
“The prose of The Forgiven has a very particular, knowing luminosity, much like the tarnished world it describes. A beautiful, compelling book to savor line by line.”
— Nikita Lalwani, author of Gifted
"Osborne writes mercilessly, savagely well. He excavates his characters, and the centuries-long cultural rift between the desert people and the Western infidels with a pathologist’s precision, wrapping fear, boredom, forgiveness, judgment, honour and sexual attraction into a novel that plunges with sinister pace towards its denouement."
—The Daily Mail
“With nods to Paul Bowles and Evelyn Waugh, Osborne portrays the vacuity of high society as gorgeously and incisively as he does the unease of cultures thrust together in the unforgiving desert.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Osborne comes up with an ending that’s at the same time ironic, surprising and completely fitting. A gripping read with moral ambiguity galore.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
BURNING ANGEL and other stories
Random House, Hogarth August 2023
A naïve young linguist sent to the forests of Irian Jaya is manipulated into betraying her mission by a ruthless and disturbed pastor. A deaf girl hired as a maid by a wealthy New York couple turns the tables on her obliviously abusive employers and answers blackmail with blackmail. A psychiatrist treating a girl in rural England becomes ensnared in a love affair that threatens to destroy her career; while a young couple on holiday in Oman accidentally witness a killing, which leads to their being hunted as well. An entomologist at a remote hotel in the Andamans survives a tsunami and uses a dead body to further her study of ants.
Collected here for the first time, Lawrence Osborne's stories, like his novels - 'elaborate and intricately plotted dances macabres' (The Times) - feel like nightmares set against calmly and meticulously observed backgrounds. With their nods to Daphne du Maurier and Roald Dahl, these nine long-form stories explore characters lost in the shadowed borders between the mundane, the fantastical and the violence of the natural world.
A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023
“Graham Greene praised Patricia Highsmith as “the poet of apprehension”, and there is something of Highsmith in Osborne’s vision of the treacherous uncertainty of human fortunes, but he has a cooler eye. “Ghost”…is one of the most unsettling pieces of writing I’ve ever read” ― John Gray
“Brilliant…clear but strong, full of mood and meaning”
- Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times
“Compelling and unnerving…In Osborne’s fictional worlds of eclipses, volcanoes and tsunamis the separation between outer reality and inner life is blurred and…we witness the enthralling, vertiginous destruction of both.”
- Emily Rhodes, The Spectator
“If you appreciate stories with stings in the tail, you will enjoy this fiendishly cunning new collection. The geographical scope of there stories is extraordinary : Manhattan, Oman, rural Derbyshire and the Andaman Islands are all drawn with loving care. But it is the cavalcade of feisty heroines that lodge in the memory. Osborne not only has the knack of keeping readers guessing, but the rarer gift of drawing them into the interior world of his characters.”
- Max Davidson, The Mail on Sunday
ON JAVA ROAD, a novel
“A superbly atmospheric reportage of a place and time...On Java Road is his most compulsive yet.”
Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
“To open a new Lawrence Osborne book is to enter a maze of thrills from which there is no exit other than to finish the book in one sitting.”
Molly Young, The New York Times
“Human nature and atmosphere will always interest Osborne more than the traditional pyrotechnics of a thriller. The palpable sense of dread that hovers over Hong Kong and Osborne’s exploration of Adrian’s own moral conundrum is what kept me turning the pages: What if your oldest friend might be a killer, but you can’t prove it? What if he isn’t a killer, but simply uses his connections and clout to make a problem like a young lover go away?
Or what if Jimmy isn’t involved at all, but Adrian has simply grown tired of the unequal nature of their friendship and sees a chance to use his own power as a journalist (albeit one whose career is teetering toward irrelevance) to bring his pal down a peg?
Once again, Osborne skillfully — and with exquisite prose — probes the nexus of community and character, and how where we are shapes who we are.”
Chris Bohjalian, The New York Times Book Review
“Lawrence Osborne’s novels are easy to admire. They tend to deal with characters trapped in morally questionable situations and their backdrops, from Macau to Greece, are often glamorous and exotic. Like any British novelist who deals with morality in foreign places, he gets compared with Graham Greene, but On Java Road, his sixth novel, owes much to Patricia Highsmith too. At its heart is a crime – the disappearance of a young woman in contemporary Hong Kong – but this, as much as anything, is a structural device on which to hang an examination of moral courage. What, Osborne asks, is required to protect democracy when doing so comes with great risk?
Osborne is an ambitious novelist and this is more than just a story about courage in Hong Kong. Throughout, the narrator Adrian Gyle opines on America’s ongoing struggles – ‘journalists in our own countries were being silenced and curtailed on a daily basis’ – and the implication is that what is happening in Hong Kong and what is happening in America and Britain are two sides of the same coin. In the end Adrian concludes that his friendship with Jimmy is ‘light as a spiderweb’ and it is clear that Osborne is wondering whether our commitment to democracy is any stronger. Democracy and freedom of the press require courage. Does Adrian have that kind of courage? Do we? Osborne is too clever a writer to reach a conclusion but the overall effect of this timely, elegantly written novel is unsettling and concerning.”
Tom Williams, The Spectator
“Marvellously convincing evocations of fractious, tear-gas-canister-strewn Hong Kong... Osborne...presents every country his novels visit clearly, without imposing his own gloss.”
Literary Review
“In the growing footprint of what he deems "Planet Tourism," his novels have become his radical reworking of travel writing - as sensual, provocative and riveting portraits of lives and places in flux.”
Washington Post
“Masterly ... This story of moral failings and totalitarian excess is as disturbing as it is irresistible.”
Peter Carty
The Ballad of a Small Player
“I’ll go right ahead say it : Osborne’s novel is the best on contemporary China since Malraux’s.”
- Paul French, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“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
New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2014
New Yorker Best Book of 2014
NPR Best Book of the Year
Selected as one of Kansas City Star's 100 Best Books of 2014
“Slim but insistent…A vivid and feverish portrait of a soul in self-inflicted purgatorio.”
—Tom Shone, New York Times Book Review
“Hypnotic…Macau and Hong Kong feel vivid and true in the novel, yet also otherworldly: Well-known landmarks and weather conditions are captured with a stillness and beauty that make them feel haunting and melancholy…But ultimately it is the uncertain fate of Doyle and the others that made me as a reader feel strangely fulfilled. The decisions they make seem connected to the thrilling and terrifying changes taking place around them. Old ways collide with a brash new world, and in this game, it is not yet clear which will emerge the winner.”
—Tash Aw, for All Things Considered
“Haunting…A captivating story about the nature of addiction, the power of the supernatural and the freedom that may come from throwing everything to chance.”
—NPR
"A searing portrait of addiction and despair set in the glittering world of Macau's casinos...Osborne's intriguing Chinese milieu and exquisite prose make this work as a standout."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[Osborne's] darkly introspective study of decline and decay conjures apt comparisons to Paul Bowles, Graham Greene, and V. S. Naipaul."
—Booklist
“Osborne’s The Forgiven, an Economist Best Book of the Year (and one of my personal Bests from last year, too), is as brilliant, unsentimental a rendering of contemporary East-West conflict and the imperfect human psyche as you are likely to find. His new work proceeds in that tradition…Don’t miss”
—Library Journal
“[Osborne] has a masterful touch with creating mood, and a swirling, world-weary foreignness pervades the story. The Ballad of a Small Player is a layered work, a novel about addiction, love and class but given an allusive face by the way it perches constantly on some supernatural brink.”
—Irish Examiner
Hunters in the Dark
“Osborne’s brilliance as a travel writer places his web of deceit, greed and need … in a world conjured up with dazzling immediacy… Sumptuous and sinister, languorous and tense, this is a novel that gives Osborne’s remarkable talents haunting scope.”
-Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times
"The ugliness of the cruelty of that time contrasts with the beauty of the language and landscape…The writing is richly sensuous, and this atmospheric novel is filled with scenes that sear themselves into the memory… The juxtaposition of dark and light is startlingly vivid. In dazzling, luminous prose, Osborne subverts expectations, so that it’s in the darkest places that we glimpse sudden moments of light...Peripatetic characters such as Robert wander through the pages of much of Osborne’s fiction, and in them he has found his forte. It’s with expert control of the narrative here that he captures a life adrift."
— Anita Sethi, The Guardian
"An elaborate and intricately plotted danse macabre."
— The Times of London
"Excellent…Grappling with manifold questions about identity and the tragic futility of material aspirations in a ruthless, brittle world, this novel draws you into a sun-struck realm where the survival of the fittest is more predicated by chance and where violence is a sudden, opportunistic enterprise."
— New Statesman
"A hauntingly beautiful story of greed, passion and, most importantly, karma."
— San Francisco Chronicle
"Osborne is hitting mean form as a writer of exotic literary thrillers. ... Sensual, dream-like and gripping."
— Monocle
"Mesmerizing"
— Tatler
“Meticulously plotted, each chance encounter, however fleeting or coincidental, advents a delicate shift in the balance of the building blocks of the narrative …Compelling...With its emphasis on double identities and double-crossing, it’s inevitable that this time Patricia Highsmith will be a point of comparison. It’s an apt one, but I was also reminded of Daphne du Maurier’s 1957 novel The Scapegoat.”
— The National
“In Hunters in the Dark, Osborne has created a wonderful evocation of Cambodia, that most haunted, seductive country… Pitilessly good. Those comparisons with Graham Greene aren’t even flattering anymore.”
— London Evening Standard
"Steeped in the menacing, fatalistic atmosphere of a country with a bloody recent past, this is a terrific novel with an ending that is utterly gripping and satisfying"
— Mail on Sunday
"The much-travelled Osborne delivers on a load of levels, not least his characters, who can ooze silky menace, or be totally soulless, desperate or lost. All are convincing in the setting of the exotic, once-deadly country. And with his easy and vivid descriptions, this masterpiece will give you prickly heat rash. 5 stars"
— Sunday Sport
"[A] rare achievement…The literary thriller is an awkward genre, usually lacking in either thrills or quality of prose, but with Hunters in the Dark, Osborne has proved once again that we can handle both and with aplomb."
— Sunday Express
"Dramatic and involving, an exhilarating adventure crafted in crisp, sharp prose...Powerful." —Literary Review
"Complex in plot yet simple and intense in style, Osborne’s narrative takes us into an Asian heart of darkness.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Osborne’s Cambodia is rendered beautifully… If the purpose of a novel is to take you away from the everyday and show you something different, then Osborne is succeeding, and handsomely.”
— Lee Child, New York Times Book Review
“Osborne is a master at creating a subtle but unmistakable sense of impending doom…An elegant, dark, well-put together novel…The book races towards a surprising ending — one that I did not see coming.”
— NPR.org
"Lush and brooding...Osborne creates an atmosphere dripping with torrential rains and intrigue. Cambodia comes off as a dangerously seductive playground, plying visitors with the sultry false promise of uncomplicated abandon among the Buddhist ruins, all under the bemused gaze of the local, ethnic Khmers who know better. The risk, of course, is that there may be no easy exit from the dizzying whirlwind of escape."
— Seattle Times
"Osborne's elegant writing, scattered with surprising bursts of violence, takes a satisfyingly firm grip on the reader once the stumbling, naive Grieve has been cast adrift to fend for himself. The ending - after a period of rising tensions - does not disappoint."
— The South China Morning Post
"Like eating fine dark chocolate, you just can’t have too much of Osborne’s latest novel. His mastery of language and his sensory encapsulation of a foreign land makes this a beautiful and creepy story, a fantastic blend of poetic language and bone-chilling tension...Similar in fashion to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Osborne’s beautiful, deliberative style conveys a sense of timelessness that embodies modern Cambodia, a country that guards its ancient treasures. Finally, Osborne offers up a landscape fuelled by heat and rain, and by an often menacing, sinister horizon that is dark in color but silently pulses with interior flashes of fire."
— Curled Up with a Good Book
“With the first two of his three elegant, stylish and ambiguous novels - The Forgiven in 2012, The Ballad of a Small Player last year, and now Hunters in the Dark – Lawrence Osborne elicited comparisons to Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, James Salter, Paul Bowles, among others. He seems to be a revenant from a species that has, paradoxically, become almost extinct following the triumph of globalisation: the traveller (or travel-writer)-novelist. Indeed, Osborne describes himself as having led “a nomadic life”, living in Paris, New York City, Mexico, Istanbul and Bangkok. The novels reflect this: The Forgiven is set in Morocco, Ballad in the gambling dens of Macau, Hunters in the Dark in Cambodia; all feature westerners running up against, or adrift in, cultures that remain opaque to them. For Osborne, the mysteriousness of these non-western cultures is not an excuse to satisfy anew the jaded occidental appetite for exoticism. Instead, he seems to be engaged in turning inside out, in startling ways, that old Jamesian theme of the confrontation of old and new worlds, of innocence versus experience, except that the new world here is the European one, “dying on its feet of torpor and smugness and debt”, from which Osborne’s protagonists are in full flight.
“…A stroke of luck sets into motion the machinery of a plot that comes to resemble a Newton’s cradle, one sphere colliding with another and transferring its energy and momentum to it, and so on, in a long, complex series.
“Written with unfailing precision and beauty, Hunters in the Dark stakes out territory different from the many writers to whom Osborne has been compared.”
- Neel Mukherjee, The Guardian
Beautiful Animals
“An astute, unsentimental critique of the contemporary world in crisis… “Osborne's distinguished palette includes the big yearning of Scott Fitzgerald and the decadent hedonism of Charles Baudelaire. Most impressive of all, and there is much to be impressed by, he handles surface and depth with immense skill, as only great writers can do. Beautiful Animals is his most accomplished book so far — a big, clever, crazed beast of a novel.”
- Deborah Levy Financial Times
“Spare, subtle… brilliantly achieved.”
- Frances Wilson Times Literary Supplement
“Complex and thrilling, Beautiful Animals confirms Osborne as one of Britain’s very best novelists.”
- Anthony Gardner Mail on Sunday
“Let’s not mince words : this is a great book.”
- Lionel Shriver
“Beautiful Animals is terrifically well constructed, written with mean authority, brilliantly evocative about place … A masterpiece of disaffection.”
- David Sexton Evening Standard
“Superlatively gripping… Osborne plunges his characters far from the luminescent surface and into the darkest depths.”
- Anita Sethi
“Osborne is a startlingly good observer of privilege, noting the rites and rituals of the upper classes with unerring precision and an undercurrent of malice.”
- Katie Kitamura, New York Times Book Review
Only to Sleep
Brilliant…Osborne and Marlowe are a perfect match.
- William Boyd
Only to Sleep is a story about age and regret and murder. About the American Dream. About The Mexican Dream. It's the kind of book where, when you read it, it turns the world to black and white for a half-hour afterward. It leaves you with the taste of rum and blood in your mouth. It hangs with you like a scar.
— NPR
Nominated for an Edgar Award Best Novel 2019
100 Notable Books of 2020, The New York Times
THE Glass Kingdom
“Oozing menace, Osborne’s compelling novel is wonderfully atmospheric and deeply macabre.”
- Daily Mail
In the garden of The Kingdom, Bangkok
Not knowing why we act is what makes us human, and it is in showing how our belief in our own autonomy can derail us that the work of Lawrence Osborne is so arresting and compelling…
Osborne’s immersion in other cultures differentiates him from writers with whom he has been compared, such as the all-too-English Graham Greene or the American Paul Bowles, who settled into expatriate life in Tangier without ever imaginatively entering the world in which most Moroccans lived.
In contrast, Osborne has used his time living in other cultures to inhabit different worlds. Some of his most powerful novels evoke the syncretic Buddhist animism of Thai folk religion. The Ballad of a Small Player (2014) tells of a crooked British solicitor who reinvents himself as an aristocrat in Macao, multiplies ill-gotten gains at the casino tables, loses it all and strays into a realm of ghosts. Hunters in The Dark (2015) recounts how an English teacher leaves his life behind to travel in Cambodia, only to be caught between the pleasures of memory-erasing hedonism and nightmares of atrocity. A highly developed sense of place features in these novels, as in all of Osborne’s work. The weather – lowering cloud-banks, enervating heat, thunderous rains – is an active protagonist in the lives of his characters. Human identities are not fixed, nor are they finally self-chosen. They morph into unfamiliar shapes along with the places in which we find ourselves.
The Glass Kingdom has nothing in common with that most boring of literary forms, “the novel of ideas”. Throughout, it is vividly realistic. The floating world of Bangkok, which seems to have passed from ancient times to the post-modern present day without any intervening period of starchy modernity, is expertly portrayed. The changing atmospheres of the city linger in the reader’s mind as much as the dark plot that unfolds. The book is worth reading for these vignettes alone.
Showing Osborne at the height of his powers, The Glass Kingdom upends the Western reader’s most basic assumptions about the human world…Slyly, almost imperceptibly, but quite relentlessly, Osborne subverts crime fiction as a genre and the world-view of its readers. As you turn the pages of this stylish and disquieting tale, you will find your fictions of choice and autonomy crumbling along with the Kingdom.
— John Gray, The New Statesman
Osborne’s novels are lavishly filmic (several have been optioned and a film version of The Forgiven is in production). They’re also disruptive, with wavering chronology and chunks of history sometimes inserted mid-scene. The disruptions seem apt, mirroring the volatility of the places where they’re set and the economic incongruities they are designed to expose. In the closing pages of The Glass Kingdom, Pop invites Sarah to share a curry and bottle of yadong with him. They sit in the garden by a brazier, under a ‘dull, half-cloudy moon’, the last two occupants of a fallen paradise. ‘You are a remarkable girl,’ he tells her, and for a moment there’s a hint of redemption, a peaceful coming together of East and West. But everything in Osborne’s fiction points to a bleaker conclusion. His fiction insists that the ability to move easily between countries has done nothing to improve mutual understanding; that the gap between rich and poor is still too wide; that the question posed at the end of A Passage to India – ‘Why can’t we be friends now? It’s what I want. It’s what you want’– still gets the same answer: ‘No, not yet. No, not here.’
- Blake Morrison, The London Review of Books
If John Le Carré’s work can be seen as an exploration of the relationship between the state and the individual in an era of mass surveillance, Osborne’s novels probe the fissures between hungry rising nations and the complacent Westerners who take their cheap labour for granted – a tension that grows more pertinent by the year.
This subject matter has led to plenty of comparisons with Graham Greene, but the aesthetic of The Glass Kingdom owes as much to Korean cinema as to any novel. Those who saw Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning Parasite will recognise the uneasy relationship between foreigners and locals, rich and poor caught in a web of envy and resentment. But the most obvious reference is Bong’s debut, Barking Dogs Never Bite, which is also set in an apartment complex, and there is an especially macabre kitchen scene towards the end of the novel that is pure horror.
As the plot starts to turn, an atmospheric, gripping novel emerges, a horror-satire of globalised capital in which money might buy you idle time or the semblance of power, but it also makes you a target. The Kingdom’s residents are blind to its fragility until it is almost too late: as apt a metaphor for 2020 as a novel could hope to provide.
- Ed Cumming, INews, UK
“A compulsively readable novelist of lean, prowling prose with a menacing, dark side.”
- Katie Law, Evening Standard
“Bangkok is the star of this accomplished novel. Its denizens are aliens to themselves, glittering on the horizon of their own lives, moving – restless and rootless and afraid – though a cityscape that has more stories than they know.”
- Hilary Mantel
“Coming off his acclaimed Philip Marlowe novel, Only to Sleep, the Bangkok-based Osborne here tilts toward Robert Stone…It′s a masterfully drawn, mesmerizing novel… A seductive, darkly atmospheric thriller with a spine-tingling climax.”
- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Although Osborne has been compared to both Graham Greene and Paul Bowles—this novel is a reminder why “expat fiction” can be a worthy exercise in the right hands—there’s a Gormenghast quality to The Glass Kingdom. Like Mervyn Peake’s decaying Gothic castle, its four 24-floor towers are emptying as they decompose from neglect and pressure from the elements and the world outside…The Glass Kingdom is filled with unexpected descriptions: a flat laconically decorated with the “gold apsaras of weekend markets and airport lounges”; a lobby in which “the turtles in the rock pool had all clambered onto the sole rock as if something in the water had expelled them.” Later,
on the matted and long-abandoned cables that looped their way across the surfaces of the shophouses a few birds sat morosely, as if waiting for someone to make a mistake.
Come for the writing, but stay for the plot.”
Asian Review of Books
“There’s an ominous sense of foreboding from the first page, and the tension ratchets up to a terrifying pitch before the horrifying and brutal conclusion. A gripping read.”
- Booklist (starred review)
In "The Glass Kingdom" there is a symbolic thread of flowers, especially the strangest of all, the Skeleton Flower which turns transparent when touched by rain.
THE Wet and the Dry
“Mr. Osborne is a superb travel writer, one who, like Evelyn Waugh, can size up a locale at almost a glance. This intoxicating book has political as well as sensual overtones. It’s about how East and West think about alcohol; quite often it’s about one man’s search for his 6:10 p.m. martini in some very unlikely locations.”
- Dwight Garner, New York Times