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Goldsboro Books

9780007182046

The Harmony Silk Factory

The Harmony Silk Factory

by Tash Aw

Publisher 4th Estate

Released:

  • Signed by the Author
  • UK First Edition
  • First Printing
  • Hardcover


Regular price £65.00
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About the book

A brilliant novel from a genuinely exciting new voice in British fiction. A novel for anyone who enjoyed The English Patient.

Set in Malaysia in the 1930s and 40s, with the rumbling of the Second World War in the background and the Japanese about to invade, The Harmony Silk Factory is the story of four people: Johnny, an infamous Chinaman a salesman, a fraudster, possibly a murderer whose shop house, The Harmony Silk Factory, he uses as a front for his illegal businesses; Snow Soong, the beautiful daughter of one of the Kinta Valleys most prominent families, who dies giving birth to one of the novels narrators; Kunichika, a Japanese officer who loves Snow too; and an Englishman, Peter Wormwood, who went to Malaysia like many English but never came back, who also loved Snow to the end of his life. A journey the four of them take into the jungle has a devastating effect on all of them, and brilliantly exposes the cultural tensions of the era.

Haunting, highly original, The Harmony Silk Factory is suspenseful to the last page.

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About the Author

Tash Aw

Tash Aw was born in Taiwan to Malaysian parents and grew up in Kuala Lumpar.

He moved to England in his teens, and studied Law at the Universities of Cambridge and Warwick. He moved to London and undertook various jobs, including working as a lawyer for four years. He then studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

His first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory (2005), won the 2005 Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (South East Asia and South Pacific Region Best First Book). It juxtaposes three accounts of the life of Johnny Lim, a Chinese peasant in rural Malay. His subsequent novels are Map of the Invisible World (2009), set in Indonesia and Malaysia in the mid-1960s, and Five Star Billionaire (2013). In 2019 he published We, the Survivors, with Fourth Estate.

His work of short fiction Sail won the O. Henry Prize in 2013 and he has had pieces published in A Public Space and the landmark Granta 100, amongst others.

  • Professionally Packed

    All of our books that have a dust wrapper are covered in clear protective, removable film and are packed professionally in bubble wrap and a box for shipping so that they reach you in perfect condition.

  • Book Condition & Notes

    All of our books that a have dust wrapper are covered in clear protective, removable film and are packed professionally in bubble wrap and a box for shipping so that they reach you in perfect condition.

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