FREE THE BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER PDF Lawrence Osborne | 224 pages | 23 Apr 2015 | Vintage Publishing | 9780099599685 | English | London, United Kingdom The Ballad of a Small Player - Wikipedia Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date. For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now. The Ballad of a Small Player is not enabled in your browser. Enabling JavaScript in your browser will allow you to experience all the features of our site. Learn how to enable JavaScript on your browser. Novel Pleasures. NOOK Book. A corrupt English lawyer who has escaped prosecution by fleeing to the East, Doyle spends his nights drinking and gambling and his days sleeping off his excesses, continually haunted by his past. Taking refuge in a series of louche and dimly lit hotels, he watches his fortune rise and fall as the cards decide his fate. In a moment of crisis he meets Dao-Ming, an enigmatic Chinese woman who appears to be a denizen of the casinos just like himself, and seems to offer him salvation in the form of both money and love. But as Doyle attempts to make a rare and true connection, all that he accepts as reality seems to The Ballad of a Small Player slipping from his grasp. Resonant of classics by Dostoevsky and Graham Greene, The The Ballad of a Small Player of a Small Player is a timeless tale steeped in eerie suspense and rich atmosphere. Home 1 Books 2. Read an excerpt of this book! Add to Wishlist. Sign in to Purchase Instantly. Explore Now. Buy As Gift. Product Details About the Author. Related Searches. On deck will be a jut-jawed Barbarian He will hardly blink as his target is ripped asunder, View Product. 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Whether tackling danger or wrestling with desire, her elite heroes The Ballad of a Small Player heroines never fail to give their all, in stories that soar above In four and a In four and a half years in Vietnam, the Marines of the Third Reconnaissance Battalion repeatedly penetrated North Vietnamese and Vietcong sanctuaries by foot and The Ballad of a Small Player helicopter to find Random House Publishing Group. NPR Choice page T o the outsider, gambling can seem like a purely acquisitive pursuit, a fast route to riches that bypasses all the hard work. Gamblers are nothing more than exceptionally lazy capitalists, investing in the vagaries of chance rather than industry, but sharing the same hunger for risk and instant wealth. As such, it can surely only appeal to the greedily materialistic. Lawrence Osborne 's new novel, his second following 's debut The Forgivenseems to pose The Ballad of a Small Player counterargument, that the impulse to gamble comes not from the desire to accumulate wealth, but rather to shed it. As Osborne's protagonist remarks, "Everyone knows you're not a real player until you secretly prefer losing. Known mostly as Lord Doyle, though in fact he is the son of a vacuum cleaner salesman from Croydon the first of many Graham Greene ish touches in this novelhe has more reason than most to want to shed The Ballad of a Small Player wealth. It is loaded with the guilt of ill-gotten gains. As a lawyer back in England, he fleeced an elderly widow; now he has fled the country, hiding out in Macau, mainland China's Las Vegas, across the bay from Hong Kong. It is a game of no skill or strategy, the card-game equivalent of tossing a coin. But Doyle cares little for winning or losing. His life seems given over to the laws of chance, as though he were trying to gamble himself out of existence. He is not an immediately likable character. When we first meet him he is playing against a woman and relishes the prospect of "skinning her alive". First there is the character known as Grandma, wife of a tycoon, who with her limitless reserves of capital is equally indifferent to winning, and seeks her thrills by annihilating the wealth of others. She is attracted, so she claims, to the anti-gambler that Doyle has almost become. The beauty of this novel is in the elegance and precision of its prose, which renders the glaring The Ballad of a Small Player of Macau into a series of exquisite miniatures, and draws The Ballad of a Small Player Osborne's reserves as a travel writer. Exquisite observations … Lawrence Osborne. Gerard Woodward. Topics Fiction reviews Reuse this content. The Ballad of a Small Player by Lawrence Osborne Look Inside. A corrupt English lawyer who has escaped prosecution by fleeing to the East, Doyle spends his nights drinking and gambling and his days sleeping off his excesses, continually haunted by his past. Taking refuge in a series of louche and The Ballad of a Small Player lit hotels, he watches his fortune rise and fall as the cards decide his fate. In a moment of crisis he meets Dao-Ming, an enigmatic Chinese woman who appears to be a denizen of the casinos just like himself, and seems to offer him salvation in the form of both money and love. But as Doyle attempts to make a rare and true connection, all that he accepts as reality The Ballad of a Small Player to be slipping from his grasp. Resonant of classics by Dostoevsky and Graham Greene, The Ballad of a Small Player is a timeless tale steeped in eerie suspense and rich atmosphere. The decisions they make seem connected to the thrilling and terrifying changes taking place The Ballad of a Small Player them. Old ways collide with a brash new world, and in this game, it is not yet clear which will emerge the winner. The Ballad of a Small Player is a layered work, a novel about addiction, love and class but given an allusive face by the way it perches constantly on some supernatural brink. This is a lean book that moves like a panther. Even better, Mr. Osborne has a keen and sometimes cruel eye for humans and their manners and morals, and for the natural world. You can open to almost any page and find brutally fine observations…. The Ballad of a Small Player holds the book together, and makes all the bits of plot machinery feel new again…. There are enough ways to read the book that one finishes it and immediately wants to start it again. A gripping read with moral ambiguity galore. Osborne has done an extraordinary job of capturing moral complexity, never letting his characters or his readers off easy. Highly recommended. In his elegant and incisive second novel, travel-journalist Osborne hauntingly captures this exposed essence in all its inscrutable mystery and dispassionate brutishness. His prose is gorgeous and precise; the story slices keenly through the exotic haze of its setting. A beautiful, compelling book to savor line by line. When you buy a book, we donate a book. Sign in. Our Holiday Gift Guide. Jan 13, ISBN Add to Cart. Also available from:. Apr 01, ISBN Available from:. Paperback —. Also by Lawrence Osborne. See all books by Lawrence Osborne. Product Details. Inspired by Your Browsing History. Book of Numbers. Joshua Cohen. The Curfew. Blue City. Ross Macdonald. Another Time, Another Life. Leif The Ballad of a Small Player Persson. Kiss Me First. Lottie Moggach. The Three Roads. Murder in the Wind. John D. Your Fathers, Where Are They? As She Climbed Across the Table. Jonathan Lethem. A Philosophical Investigation. Donald E. Lost Echoes. Joe R. The Ballad of a Small Player Getaway Man. 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