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  • Published: 1 May 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409087083
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
Categories:

Bangkok Days




A passionate, affectionate record of adventures and misadventures in the world's hottest metropolis.

Tourists come to Bangkok for many reasons: a night of love, a stay in a luxury hotel, or simply to disappear for a while. Lawrence Osborne comes for the cheap dentistry, and then stays when he finds he can live off just a few dollars a day.

Osborne's Bangkok is a vibrant, instinctual city full of contradictions. He wanders the streets, dining on insects, trawling through forgotten neighbourhoods, decayed temples and sleazy bars.

Far more than a travel book, Bangkok Days explores both the little-known, extraordinary city and the lives of a handful of doomed ex-patriates living there, 'as vivid a set of liars and losers as was ever invented by Graham Greene' (New York Times).

  • Published: 1 May 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409087083
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
Categories:

About the author

Lawrence Osborne

Born in England, Lawrence Osborne is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Forgiven, The Ballad of a Small Player, Hunters in the Dark, Beautiful Animals, Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe novel (commissioned by the Raymond Chandler estate) and The Glass Kingdom. His non-fiction ranges from memoir through travelogue to essays, including Bangkok Days, The Naked Tourist and The Wet and the Dry. His short story 'Volcano' was selected for Best American Short Stories 2012.

The Forgiven
, starring Ralph Fiennes, Matt Smith and Jessica Chastain, is due to be released in summer 2022; Hunters in the Dark will shoot in Cambodia with Aneurin Barnard, Adam Pettyfer and Tzi Ma; and Beautiful Animals is now in production with Amazon. Osborne lives in Bangkok.


www.lawrenceosborne.net

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Praise for Bangkok Days

An enlightening tour of the twilight world of exile

Traveller

He is a first-rate observer and analyst... Any Westerner curious to take a decadent Oriental trip with a writer you can trust to keep you turning the pages should pick up a copy

New York Times

He uses language with great skill, and the sounds and smells of Bangkok are wonderfully evoked. Osborne's writing conveys a geniune love for the city

Library Journal

With a brief stint as a gigolo, insights into the Buddhist interpretation of transgender 'kathoeys', and several friendships with various wayward desolates, Osborne maintains a lively note to proceedings throughout... this book has an underlying sense of warmth and genuine fondness for its subject matter

Real Travel Magazine

Thailand inspires such enthralled romanticism that it also invites great cynicism and it is a feat to acknowledge all its complexities and graces, as Osborne does, without ever quite surrendering to them

Pico Iyer, Los Angeles Times

Osborne paints an evocative portrait of the Thai capital

Sara Wheeler, The Lady

Osborne is an accomplished travel writer... Osborne creates a city of beauty in its own right, and it is one in constant conflict of identity

Eats.com

One of the best travel books I have read for a long time, as books always are when written from the inside, by someone who has not just visited a city but lives in it at what you might call "street level"... Not the Bangkok the cheap-flight brigade will ever see

Susan Hill, The Lady

Nicely observed

William Leith, Scotsman

He vividly sketches the characters he meets: a man with a degree in air-conditioning, one with an air of "upper-class twittery"... Osborne's travelogue is, however, memorably touching

Anita Sethi, Independent on Sunday