The Bell-Boy

Paperback

Main Details

Title The Bell-Boy
Authors and Contributors      By (author) James Hamilton-Paterson
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback
Pages:192
Dimensions(mm): Height 216,Width 135
Category/GenreModern and contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
ISBN/Barcode 9780571317530
ClassificationsDewey:823.914
Audience
General
Edition Main

Publishing Details

Publisher Faber & Faber
Imprint Faber & Faber
Publication Date 17 July 2014
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

The Bell-Boy was James Hamilton-Paterson's third novel, first published in 1990. 'Somewhere on my tropical travels I encountered a rickety hotel on whose roof an ancient servant lived in a converted hen coop. This gave me the idea for a young bell-boy, Laki, who is up from the provinces and lives on top of his hotel in the holy city of Malomba. He moonlights as a shrewd guide for foreign visitors, his latest clients being a hippie English family who are in Malomba for psychic surgery. Their mutual exploitation leads to both farce and minor tragedy.' James Hamilton-Paterson 'A brilliant religious satire with elements of E.F. Benson and Evelyn Waugh... Few books since E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (whose formal perfection this novel shares) have conveyed more intensely the allure (and the revulsion) the East holds for Westerners.' New York Times

Author Biography

James Hamilton-Paterson is the author of the bestselling Empire of the Clouds, which was hailed as a classic account of the golden age of British aviation. He won a Whitbread Prize for his first novel, Gerontius, and among his many other celebrated books are Seven-Tenths, one of the finest books written in recent times about the oceans, the satirical trilogy that began with Cooking with Fernet Branca, and the autobiographical Playing With Water. Born and educated in England, he has lived in the Philippines and Italy and now makes his home in Austria.