The Ballad of a Small Player

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SOON TO BE A MAJOR NETFLIX FILM, STARRING COLIN FARELL AND TILDA SWINTON

‘I waited patiently for the next hand to be played out, and I had a feeling it was going to be a Natural, a perfect nine.’

His name is Lord Doyle.

His plan: to gamble away his last days in the dark and decadent casino halls of Macau.

His game: baccarat punto blanco -- 'that slutty dirty queen of casino card games.'

Though Doyle is not a Lord at all. He is a fake; a corrupt lawyer who has spent a career siphoning money from rich clients. And now he is on the run, determined to send the money – and himself – up in smoke.

So begins a beguiling, elliptical velvet rope of a plot: a sharp suit, yellow kid gloves, another naughty lemonade and an endless loop of small wins and losses. When Lady Luck arrives in the form of Dao-Ming, a beautiful yet enigmatic lost soul, so begins a spectacular and unnatural winning streak in which millions come Doyle’s way. But in these shadowy dens of risk and compulsion, in a land governed by superstition, Doyle knows that when the bets are high, the stakes are even greater.

The Ballad of a Small Player is a sleek, dark-hearted masterpiece: a ghost story set in the land of the living, and a decadent morality tale of a Faustian pact made, not with the devil, but with fortune’s fickle hand.

A modern Graham Greene.... into this relatively quiet period for British fiction, someone remarkable and unexpected has emerged fully armed with a formidable, masterly grip on the British novel. At precisely the point where most novelists start to show signs of flagging, Osborne has hit his creative, fictional stride...and has arrived as a thrilling, exceptional talent in British fiction's landscape.
Robert Collins, Sunday Times

The Ballad of a Small Player shares the exoticism and East-West disconnect of The Quiet American, the unresolved supernaturalism of The Heart of the Matter and Loser Takes All's bittersweet relationship with the gaming tables. If Osborne's book is a love letter to gambling, it's the kind written at 3am to an indifferent ex after an evening at the bar -- an ode to self-destruction. A brisk, electrifying read... the most ambiguous, and therefore the most enjoyable, kind of ghost story. The Ballad of a Small Player remains elusive, and is all the better for that.
Adrian Turpin, Literary Review

About Lawrence Osborne

Lawrence Osborne is a critically acclaimed novelist, journalist, and screenwriter based in Bangkok. He is the author of eight novels, including Ballad of a Small Player, Beautiful Animals, and The Forgiven. His non-fiction ranges from memoir through travelogue to essays, including Bangkok Days, The Naked Tourist and The Wet and the Dry. His novels have been chosen as Books of the Year by the Guardian, the Observer, the Daily Telegraph, the New Statesman, the Daily Mail, The Economist, The New Yorker and the New York Times. The Forgiven was made into a film in 2022 starring Jessica Chastain and Ralph Fiennes and Ballad of a Small Player starring Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton was released on Netflix in 2025.

Details

Imprint: Vintage Digital
Published: 03/04/2014
ISBN: 9781448189717
Length: 224 pages
Price: £4.99

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The Ballad of a Small Player

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A perfectly written existential thriller, a spooky, gripping, heart-in-your-mouth read that has profound things to say about the only god who rules human affairs – chance.

Damn. Another writer I have to care about… dark, brilliant and about as ignorable as a switchblade.

Hypnotic, razor-sharp in its insights, compelling... in Osborne's hands, the moments of suspense are handled with so much skill that we sometimes read them more as memoir than elements of a thriller.

With its ex-pat angst and debauched air of moral ambiguity set amid the sinister demi-monde of the Far East’s corrupt gambling dens, Osborne’s darkly introspective study of decline and decay conjures apt comparisons to Paul Bowles, Graham Greene, and V. S. Naipaul.

The beauty of this novel is in the elegance and precision of its prose, which renders the glaring kitsch of Macau into a series of exquisite miniatures, and draws on Osborne's reserves as a travel writer.

Lawrence Osborne’s latest will leave you breathless… [It] will screw up your guts with anxiety, fill you with hope and then kick you hard in the bcks all in one well-weighted read. No need to gamble -- it's an absolute winner of a book.

A brisk, electrifying read, as elegant in negotiating the rackety world it depicts as its bow-tied narrator

About Lawrence Osborne

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