It is 1935, and Tom Stewart, a young Englishman with a longing for adventure, buys himself a cheap ticket aboard the SS Darjeeling -en route to the complex and corrupt world of Hong Kong. A shipboard wager leads to an unlikely friendship that spans seven decades as Hong Kong endures the savagery of the Japanese occupation, emerging as a crossroads of international finance and the nexus of a world of warlords, drug runners, and Chinese triads. The title of this ambitious historical novel is a translation of the name Hong Kong and, as one character explains, a "Chinese joke": when Tom Stewart, a twenty-two-year-old Englishman, sails into Hong Kong harbor in 1935, he finds the waters polluted and the city hopelessly corrupt. A publican's son, he reinvents himself as a hotelier and spies for the Empire during the Japanese occupation, all the while keeping silent about his passion for a Chinese nun whom he met on the ship from England. Two present-day narratives bookend Tom's story, one by an on-the-make female British journalist, the other by a Chinese businessman whose family fled the mainland during the Cultural Revolution. The most vital character, however, is Hong Kong itself, brought noisily to life as a city of permanent rootlessness, where inhabitants identify themselves, even after decades, as expatriates and refugees. Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker "An ambitious novel . . . Mr. Lanchester succeeds in fusing the epic with the individual." ( The New York Times ) "A lovely, intelligent, and beguiling book." (Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World ) "Lanchester makes Hong Kong so fascinating. What he has to say about the city is complex and thoughtful and has all the makings of a great, epic story." ( San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle ) John Lanchester is the author of The Debt to Pleasure (winner of the Whitbread and Hawthornden prizes) and Mr. Phillips . Raised in Hong Kong, he now lives in London with his wife and sons.