Martin Booth

Golden Boy (eBook, ePUB)

Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

At seven years old, Martin Booth found himself with all of Hong Kong at his feet. His father was posted there in 1952, and this memoir is his telling of that youth, a time when he had access to the corners of a colony normally closed to a "Gweilo," a "pale fellow" like him.

His experiences were colorful and vast. Befriending rickshaw coolies and local stallholders, he learned Cantonese, sampled delicacies such as boiled water beetles and one-hundred-year-old eggs, and participated in vibrant festivals. He even entered the forbidden Kowloon Walled City, wandered into a secret lair of Triads, and visited an opium den.

From the plink-plonk man with his dancing monkey to the Queen of Kowloon (a crazed tramp who may have been a Romanov), Martin Booth saw it all---but his memoir illustrates the deeper challenges he faced in his warring parents: a broad-minded mother who embraced all things Chinese and a bigoted father who was enraged by his family's interest in "going native."

Martin Booth's compelling memoir, the last book he completed before dying, glows with infectious curiosity and humor and is an intimate representation of the now extinct time and place of his growing up.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: St. Martin's Publishing Group
• Seitenzahl: 352
• Erscheinungstermin: 14. November 2006
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781466818583
• Artikelnr.: 39412935

Autorenporträt

Martin Booth (1944-2004) was a British novelist and poet. He also worked as a teacher and screenwriter, and founded the Sceptre Press. He was born in Lancashire, but was brought up mainly in Hong Kong, which he left for Britain in 1964. He first made his name as a poet and as a publisher, producing slim volumes by British and American poets. His own books of verse include the two Knotting books collected here, as well as Killing the Moscs and Meeting the Snowy North Again. In the late 1970s Booth turned mainly to writing fiction. His first successful novel, Hiroshima Joe, was published in 1985, and contains passages set in that city during the Second World War. His lifelong interest in observing and studying wildlife resulted in a book about his childhood hero Jim Corbett, a big-game hunter and expert on man-eating tigers, and also a subsequent study of the endangered rhino. Later non-fiction books included a remarkable guide to Hong Kong, The Dragon and the Pearl, as well as biographies of Aleister Crowley and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. While his successful early novels tended to reflect his own past in an Africa and Asia touched by the British Empire, his later books reflected his interest in European locations, such as Italy, which features in the novel A Very Private Gentleman (1990, later filmed as The American, starring George Clooney in 2010). His penultimate novel, Industry of Souls, was set in Russia and was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize. He died of cancer in 2004, shortly after completing Gweilo (released as Golden Boy in the USA), a memoir of his Hong Kong childhood written for his own children.