The Glass Kingdom

Showing Osborne at the height of his powers, The Glass Kingdom upends the Western reader's most basic assumptions about the human world . . . stylish and disquieting

John Gray, New Statesman

Lawrence Osborne goes from strength to strength. In The Glass Kingdom he once again displays a feel for the Westerner abroad in an alien culture, where misunderstandings can prove deadly. The author has lived for years in Bangkok, whose seediness runs deeper than the superficially icky red light district most foreign writers take on. Great characters, plenty of suspense, and a killer ending

Lionel Shriver, Evening Standard, Books of the Year

Bangkok is the star of this accomplished novel. Its denizens are aliens to themselves, glittering on the horizon of their own lives, moving - restless and rootless and afraid - though a cityscape that has more stories than they know

Hilary Mantel

Osborne, who specialises in stories about hapless Westerners coming a cropper in foreign lands, has another hit on his hands with this sinister, sensuous and wonderfully evocative tale

Katie Law, Evening Standard

Oozing menace, Osborne's compelling novel is wonderfully atmospheric and deeply macabre

Anthony Gardner, Mail on Sunday

Bewitching

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Daily Mail

The author's exceptional descriptive skills fuel an overwhelming sense of menace . . . the next day you will still be thinking of Sarah's fate with horror

Louise Doughty, New York Times

An atmospheric, gripping novel . . . a horror-satire of globalised capital in which money might buy you idle time or the semblance of power, but it also makes you a target. The Kingdom's residents are blind to its fragility until it is almost too late: as apt a metaphor for 2020 as a novel could hope to provide

Ed Cumming

Lawrence Osborne did not disappoint in his atmospheric thriller The Glass Kingdom

Lionel Shriver, Observer, *Books of the Year*

Osborne masterfully depicts . . . a Bangkok where an irrational yet intoxicating mix of Buddhism and animism holds sway alongside laissez-faire economics . . . eroding his characters' sense of autonomy through attrition

Max Crosbie-Jones, ArtReview

Osborne's novels are lavishly filmic . . . The setting is luxurious, the lifestyle hedonistic, the climate oppressively hot. Prodigious amounts of alcohol are consumed. As events accelerate towards a violent finale, the reader is kept guessing. How severe will the consequences be for the interloper? Which will prevail, revenge or forgiveness?

Blake Morrison, London Review of Books