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The Orientalist and the Ghost book cover
The Orientalist and the Ghost
2008
First Published
3.46
Average Rating
354
Number of Pages
Dark themes of colonial misconduct, racial prejudice, and doomed love resonate throughout this novel, yet it is infused with characteristic humor and warmth. It opens in Malaysia during the 1950s Communist insurrection when a young Englishman, Christopher, falls in love with a Chinese girl. The book then moves to 1969 where Frances, Christopher's Eurasian teenage daughter, is seduced by a Chinese teacher twice her age and drawn into the Malay-Chinese race riots in Kuala Lumpur. The final part of the book travels to 1990s London; Frances' two mixed-race children live with their grandfather on a council estate, and embark on a quest to discover the truth behind their mother's death.
Avg Rating
3.46
Number of Ratings
87
5 STARS
15%
4 STARS
33%
3 STARS
37%
2 STARS
13%
1 STARS
2%
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Author

Susan Barker
Susan Barker
Author · 5 books

Susan Barker (born 1978) is a British novelist. She has an English father and a Chinese-Malaysian mother and grew up in East London. She is the author of the novel Sayonara Bar, which Time magazine called "a cocktail of astringent cultural observations, genres stirred and shaken, subplots served with a twist" and The Orientalist and the Ghost, both published by Doubleday (UK) and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her third novel The Incarnations (Doubleday UK, July 2014) is about a taxi driver in contemporary Beijing and interwoven with tales from the Tang dynasty, the invasion of Genghis Khan, the Ming dynasty, the Opium War, and the Cultural Revolution. While writing The Incarnations she spent several years living in Beijing, researching modern and imperial China.

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