Sour Sweet
Synopsis
At the centre of 1960s London the busy Chinese community lives by its own precise and violent rules, flourishing like a spiky, brilliant crystal garden in the murky waters of Soho. Pitched into an alien city which is neither hostile nor friendly but very strange and very foreign, the Chen family prospers by deftly and sometimes incongruously blending tradition and opportunity. But no private family lives beyond the reach of the largest and most powerful Chinese ‘family’ - the Triad.
Author Biography
Timothy Mo was born in Hong Kong in 1950. After graduating from St John’s College, Oxford, he worked as a journalist for the New Statesman and Boxing News. His first novel, The Monkey King, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. His next three novels were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction: Sour Sweet, winner of the Hawthornden Prize; An Insular Possession; and The Redundancy of Courage. Sour Sweet was adapted as a film in 1988 with a screenplay by Ian McEwan. His more recent novel Renegade or Halo2 was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction).
