Hunters in the Dark

From the novelist the New York Times compares to Paul Bowles, Evelyn Waugh and Ian McEwan, an evocative new work of literary suspense
 
Adrift in Cambodia and eager to side-step a life of quiet desperation as a small-town teacher, 28-year-old Englishman Robert Grieve decides to go missing. As he crosses the border from Thailand, he tests the threshold of a new future.

And on that first night, a small windfall precipitates a chain of events — involving a bag of “jinxed” money, a suave American, a trunk full of heroin, a hustler taxi driver, and a rich doctor’s daughter– that changes Robert’s life forever.

Hunters in the Dark is a sophisticated game of cat and mouse redolent of the nightmares of Patricia Highsmith, where identities are blurred, greed trumps kindness, and karma is ruthless. Filled with Hitchcockian twists and turns, suffused with the steamy heat and pervasive superstition of the Cambodian jungle, and unafraid to confront difficult questions about the machinations of fate, this is a masterful novel that confirms Lawrence Osborne’s reputation as one of our finest contemporary writers.

“Readers will remember…Osborne’s lush, vivid descriptions of a land where ‘the daily thunder rolled in with a generous laziness and the trees shimmered with lightening.'” Publishers Weekly

“Osborne successfully demonstrates the inextricably linked relationship between introspection and change. A deeply penetrating meditation on the human experience of belonging.” Library Journal (starred review)

“Osborne, frequently compared to Graham Greene (The Balladof a Small Player, 2014), writes evocatively about the beauties and mysteries of Cambodia…Hunters in the Dark is a strange and heady novel sure to engage armchair travelers.” Booklist

“Complex in plot yet simple and intense in style, Osborne’s narrative takes us into an Asian heart of darkness.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Osborne’s Cambodia is rendered beautifully… If the purpose of a novel is to take you away from the everyday and show you something different, then Osborne is succeeding, and handsomely.” Lee Child, New York Times Book Review

Lawrence Osborne is the author of one previous novel, Ania Malina, and six books of nonfiction, including the memoir Bangkok Days. His journalism and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Newsweek, Forbes, Tin House, Harper’s, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other publications. Osborne has led a nomadic life, residing for years in France, Italy, Morocco, the United States, Mexico, and Thailand. He currently lives in Istanbul.