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A classic novel by a Booker Prize-winning author.

Soon to be adapted for an ITV television series by the Oscar-winning playwright behind Atonement and Dangerous Liaisons, Christopher Hampton.

Singapore just before the Japanese invasion in the Second World War: the Blackett family’s prosperous world of tennis parties, cocktails and deferential servants seems unchanging. But it is poised on the edge of the abyss: This is the eve of the Fall of Singapore and, as we know, of much else besides.

Not only the Blacketts, their friends and enemies, but many individuals are caught up in the events. Singapore at this historical watershed has never been so faithfully and passionately recreated.

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Reviews

Sunday Times
Enjoyable on many different levels
Newsweek
A narrative of exceptional imagination and scope
Observer
Brilliant, richly absurd, melancholy
Margaret Drabble
A fine piece of work, informative, funny tragic. One of those novels that present a whole world for the reader to inhabit
Spectator
One of the most outstanding novelists of his generation
Time
No writer has swallowed all of Singapore with the verve and wit of the late J.G. Farrell
Olivia Manning
His brilliant of style places him beside such masters of the modern novel as Patrick White and Saul Bellow