The Ballad of a Small Player

Resumen del libro

'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.

Biografía del autor

Lawrence Osborne (1958) nació en Inglaterra, pero ha vivido y trabajado en diversos países de todo el mundo: Nueva York, México, Estambul o Bangkok, ciudad donde reside en la actualidad. Estudió Lenguas Modernas en Cambridge, ciudad en la que publicó su primera novela: Ania Malina (1986). En 2010 obtuvo el Premio Napoli y en 2012 publicó la novela Perdonar (editada en catalán por Navona), que fue considerada uno de los mejores libros del año por The Economist, Library Journal y The Guardian. Otras obras suyas son The Wet and the Dry (2013), The Ballad of a Small Player (2014), Beautiful Animals (2017) o Cazadores en la noche (2019). Osborne colabora habitualmente en el New York Times Magazine, así como en la edición internacional de Newsweek.