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‘It’s Hong Kong’, she said. ‘Heung gong. Fragrant harbour’. Fragrant Harbour is the story of four people whose intertwined lives span Asia’s last seventy years. Tom Stewart leaves England to seek his fortune, and finds it in running Hong Kong’s best hotel. Sister Maria is a beautiful and uncompromising Chinese nun whom Stewart meets on the boat. Dawn Stone is an English journalist who becomes the public face of money and power and big business. Matthew Ho is a young Chinese entrepreneur whose life has been shaped by painful choices made long before his birth. The complacency of colonial life in the 1930s; the horrors of the Japanese occupation during the Second World War; the post-war boom; the growth of the Triads; and the hand over of the city to the Chinese – all these are present in Fragrant Harbour, an epic novel of one of the world’s great cities and John Lanchester’s finest book to date.