Before, during and after I wrote Do Not Keep Silent, a book set in Hong Kong, I read a lot of fiction set there. This list highlights my favourites, in no particular order except the first, which is my favourite.
1. Do Not Keep Silent by Anthony Addis (obviously!)
Set immediately before, during and after a protest in Hong Kong, Do Not Keep Silent follows Mae, the protest’s leader, and Pete, an English tourist as they attempt to balance love, grief, duty and loyalty.
2. Kowloon Tong by Paul Theroux
Written as a metaphor for the handover, Kowloon Tong tells the story of Bunt, an expat factory owner struggling to cope with a changing Hong Kong.
3. On Java Road by Lawrence Osbourne
British journalist Adrian Giles attempts to solve the mystery of a missing student protester during a Hong Kong protest. Lawrence Osbourne brilliantly captures the atmosphere of Hong Kong during the protests.
4. The Borrowed by Chan Ho-Kei
Hong Kong detective Kwan Chun-dok investigates a series of crimes over 40 years, across Hong Kong’s changing times and social/historical circumstances.
5. Second Sister by Chan Ho-Kei
A young woman enlists the help of an anti-social hacker to seek revenge on the cyberbullies that drove her sister to suicide. Of the two books by Chan H-Kei, this was my favourite.
6. Little Drummer Girl by John Le Carre
British actress Charlie is recruited to infiltrate a terrorist network. An important covert mission takes her to Hong Kong. John Le Carre was a genius, but in all honesty, I found the descriptions in Little Drummer Girl to be overly dense. The plot suffered from a similar problem, but there is something about the main character and her circumstances that kept me reading
7. Typhoon by Charles Cumming
The first section is set in Hong Kong, about a spy whose career goes very wrong during a defection at the time of the handover. The mood of the handover is shown well.
8. Tai-Pan by James Clavell
Telling the story of Hong Kong’s early days as a colony, James Clavell’s epic novel follows Dirk Struan as he negotiates his business interests while treading a path between Chinese determination to retake Hong Kong and British imperialism. It’s an epic tale, but the speech written constantly in the form of dialect takes determination and a lot of endurance to get through.
9. The Ava Lee series by Ian Hamilton
Ava Lee is a Hong Kong national living in Canada whose cases often take her back to Hong Kong. She’s a forensic accountant, a job that entails hardcore martial arts and determined investigative skills – not to mention some very unsavoury contacts in the Hong Kong underworld.
10. Yellowthread Street by William Marshall
Set pre-handover, William Marshall’s terrific Yellowthread series follows the Yellowthread police department’s attempts to solve a series of baffling and often surreal cases. The books are written with a lot of humour, but are also very exciting.
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