An Insular Possession
Timothy MoTimothy Mo’s sweeping historical novel is set on the China coast in the 1830s, before and during the 19th-century Opium Wars.
"Astute and unremitting." - Glasgow Herald
In 1833, Walter Eastman and Gideon Chase, young Americans working in the ‘Factories’ - the home of the East India Company on the south China coast - are at loggerheads with the European community which thrives on the opium trade. When Eastman is fired, he and Chase establish an irreverent weekly paper, which shows flamboyance and crusading zeal. When the first Opium War breaks out their lives grow increasingly dangerous.
"A marvellous, monumental achievement, highly intelligent, witty and having the gravitas of true historical insight... A first-class historical novel of tremendous sweep." - Spectator
Timothy Peter Mo Three of his novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His works have won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). Mo was also the recipient of the 1992 E. M. Forster Award. Since 1994, when he rejected a £125,000 advance from Random House for his next novel, he has self-published his books under the label Paddleless Press.