This is not intended to be a full statement of all your rights under the Distance Selling Regulations. Fragrance’ might stem from the fact that the harbour waters are sweetened by fresh water from the Pearl River; alternatively, it may refer to the sweet smell of incense being sold from the shore but carried by the wind across the harbour waters. Not sure if the first part of the novel was necessary and the main female character in this part was not particularly likeable.

And this is Sasek’s brilliance: his illustrations interpret the adult city to the child, but they as often take their reference from the child’s perspective.He provides a strong sense of history too, covering the city’s physical development from the mid-1930s to the Chinese handover in 1997. Their “friendship”, albeit as journalist and source, works both ways: Dawn gets to use him for stories, he later gets to use her to pitch a business idea to her powerful boss. Aboard ship, he becomes the pawn in a wager between a bluff businessman and a Chinese missionary nun, who bets she can teach him Cantonese on the six-week voyage out. Sasek was instructing the child about the adult’s world, as much as capturing things of immediate interest to the child. Add to that a sailing arena that is certainly the best in Hong Kong, if not Asia when you factor in prevailing winds .

Wunderschön formuliert und als Gesamtwerk eine dicke Empfehlung für alle die ein gutes Buch zu schätzen wissen. Phillips, excelled in cleverness but didn't hint at the depth of feeling and narrative drive that he manifests here. On his voyage out, Tom is made the object of a curious bet between a Chinese nun and language teacher, Sister Maria, and an anti-Catholic English businessman. Thank goodness, then, for fine upstanding citizen Tom, whose story takes up the greater chunk of this novel.Matthew Ho is a young Chinese entrepreneur whose life has been shaped by painful choices made long before his birth, and who is now facing his own difficulties, and opportunities, in the twenty-first century. Tom Stewart leaves England just before it is hit by the Great Depression to seek his fortune, and finds it in running Hong Kong’s best hotel. The idea was pretty simple: I just made a mental note of every time I heard someone tell a porky, and kept a running total. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. In this capacity he first encountered the work of Samuel Palmer and of Blake, and Blake, particularly, was to have a life-long influence on his work.

It loses those qualities when the author is speaking in the tones of Dawn Stone, who occupies those 50 pages at the start of the book describing her first steps up the ladder of media success; she is pert and modern and rather dull.Fragrant Harbor takes the reader from the intrigue and double-dealing of the 1930s through the savagery of the Japanese occupation to contemporary Hong Kong -- the crossroads of international trade and finance and the waystation for laundering the dirty money of warlords, drug runners, and Chinese triads.

His friendship with Sister Maria, the Chinese-born Catholic nun whom he meets on the boat trip from England (she teaches him Cantonese during the six-week sea voyage) is the one constant that grounds him. Agreeing a compromise, his father sent him to study machine draughtsmanship at the Knirr School of Art, Munich, with the thought that this would give his son a skill he might apply professionally. Either way, it is no exaggeration to say that the view of Hong Kong harbour is one of the greatest views of the world. M. Forster Award, and the Premi Llibreter, been longlisted for the Booker Prize, and been translated into twenty-five languages. But before we get to hear Tom’s tale, the book opens in bombastic style with the story of an ambitious female journalist wanting to make her mark on the world.After schooling in Edinburgh, and contrary to his father’s wishes, Edward did not take up work at the mill; he wanted instead to study art. Though he is the son of a Kent publican, and had never been much east of Whitstable in early life, Stewart has inherited or acquired the emotional insufficiency of the Empire-building upper-class male. But we also know that the city attracts the rich and powerful, and offers a lifestyle many can only dream about.