Lawrence Osborne Books In Order

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Lawrence Osborne is a British travel and fiction author who currently makes his home in Bangkok, Thailand. As a teen, Osborne went to Fitzwilliam College, then off to Harvard and Cambridge. Upon graduation, he became a nomad and has lived all over the place from Istanbul, France, Thailand, Italy, Mexico, the United States, and Morocco. He is the author of “Paris Dreambook” a book that chronicled his experiences in Paris, the novel Ania Malina, a book about wine, The Poisoned Embrace which is a critically acclaimed essay collection, three travel books published by Giroux, Straus, and Farrar between 2002 and 2009, and “American Normal,” a controversial book on the topic of autism. His other works include an account of his life as an expatriate in Thailand he titled “Bangkok Days,” “The Naked Tourist,” and “The Accidental Connoisseur.” He is also the author of several short stories that have been published in a variety of magazines in the United States. He has also worked as a long-form journalist in the US and has worked for “Conde Nast Traveler,” “The New York Times Magazine,” “Playboy,” “The New Yorker,” “Salon,” and “Gourmet.” He is also a frequent contributor to “The Wall Street Journal Magazine,” “The Daily Beast,” “Newsweek International,” and occasionally writes an Op-Ed for “Forbes. He won the Thomas Lowell Award for Travel Journalism for “Getting a Drink in Islamabad” which was featured in a 2011 issue of “Playboy.”

Osborne was born to a father that was a market researcher and journalist mother that authored radio plays. The family made their home in southwest London and moved to Haywards Heath when he was nine years old. His love for writing was inculcated in him early on as his parents were aspirant middle-class family that listened to classical music and read “Readers Digest.” As a teenager, he was not the model child as he never showed much interest in academics until very late in his teenage years, when he decided to learn Greek. He used to head to the prep school up the road from his home and learn the language from a courtly gay guy who had taken a liking to him. Cambridge was impressed by his efforts at learning a new language that he was offered a place to go study English. After graduating from Cambridge, he was admitted to Harvard but academics was never for him and he quit to go live in Paris. It was during this period of his life that he moved around a lot until he settled in Italy with his then-wife. Living on a Tuscany olive farm, he penned and published “Ania Malina” in 1986 that was a post-World War II Lolita-Esque romance. His second was an unlamented comic book titled “The Angelic Game” that went nowhere. Osborne was so frustrated that he did not write until his blockbuster novel “The Forgiven” in 2012.

A chance call from the owner of the “San Diego Reader” saw him leave everything behind and head to San Diego. He was offered more money per feature he wrote than he could ever have gotten for the novels he was writing, and he believed this was an offer he could not refuse. He wrote for the “San Diego Reader” for several years until he got his big break when he was commissioned to research and write a feature about Nicaraguan deaf children by “The New York Times.” Suddenly, he had jobs coming from all over the place as he became a wine columnist for “Vogue,” was sent to Papua New Guinea by the “New Yorker,” and on to Morocco to pen a feature on the trilobite mines for the “New York Times” among many other jobs. Nearly ten years later, he was at a party when he hears the story of a couple on vacation that had knocked over and killed a local child – the middle-class person’s nightmare. Within six weeks, he had the manuscript for “The Forgiven” and queried Charlie Conrad, a young editor at Random House who bought it immediately. He has never looked back and since then has written four more titles and also contributed to the Philip Marlowe series of novels.

“The Forgiven” by Lawrence Osborne is a haunting and stylish novel about Jo Henniger and David a children’s book author and doctor looking for an escape from their miserable lives in London. They have been invited by Dally and Richard their old friends to go spend some time in their luxurious retreat in the Moroccan desert. While heading to Morocco, they stop to get lunch David is in a foul mood and consumes much of the bottle of wine they are served. When they get back on the road, he is a mess and groggy as hell which makes finding their friends’ home an impossible task in the night. Out of nowhere, two local men come out of the roadside intending to sell them some fossils. In a panic, David swerves and hits one of them while the other runs off and disappears over the hills. At the retreat, the party is on and their friends’ international friends are sitting down to eat a meal prepared by Moroccan staff. Over the course of the night, the Moroccans look disapprovingly at the party-goers as immoral infidels. When Jo and David arrive late at night with the corpse of the man they had hit, the word soon spreads among the locals that the foreigners had killed someone.

Lawrence Osborne’s “The Ballad of a Small Player” is set in Macau where Doyle is looking to get lucky. In the cool night air, he heads into a casino where he intends to play the baccarat tables. He is a corrupt English lawyer that fled to the East as he was wanted for his crimes, He spends most of his nights gambling and drinking to forget his past with most of his days spent sleeping off the excesses of the night before. He lives in dimly lit and louche hotels and watches his fortune rise and fall depending on how he fares at the gaming tables. In a moment of crisis, he bumps into an enigmatic Chinese lady named Dao Ming who loves the casinos just as much as him. What is even better is that she is offering both love and money, which are things he does need at the moment. But as he tries to make a true even if rare connection, what he had come to accept as reality seems to be slipping away from him.

Lawrence Osborne’s “Hunters in the Dark” is a quiet and compelling thriller that is all about the theme of innocence abroad. The lead is an aimless twenty-eight-year-old teacher from England who lives in Cambodia, where he interacts with an American sociopath that becomes his best friend alongside a bunch of Khmer characters. He had always felt confined by the middle-class life in Sussex and found release in his travels until Europe got boring. He had gone to Asia and after a few days in Thailand went into Cambodia. Heading to the casinos, he had been lucky enough to win $2,000 at the first try and decided that he should try to be a wandering ex-pat for a time. Chance and luck underpin the story alongside the intersection of different social classes and cultures. Cambodia is a land recovering from the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime in which a quarter of the population had been killed in a few years. It is a land whose inhabitants believe is haunted by ghosts from the past and Robert who believes in the paranormal will be confronted by the reality of spirits.