Last Year in Hong Kong: A Love Story [Hardcover]

Robert S. Elegant (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1997

Robert Elegant's best-selling epics have sold millions of copies worldwide and won him immense critical acclaim. Now he returns to Hong Kong, the scene he knows better than any other living novelist with this long-awaited, beautifully crafted story about a doomed love affair set against Hong Kong's last months before its handover to China.

Newly divorced, Lucretia Barnes, relieved to be free of the husband who embodied all the worst characteristics of Hong Kong, is struggling to make ends meet and is wary of a new relationship. But when she meets Robbie, the astonishingly handsome and charming son of an English mother and a Tibetan father, there is an intense attraction. As their relationship develops, so too does Lucretia's sensitivity to the culture and the people of Hong Kong. Building to a shattering conclusion, this compelling love story displays the masterful storytelling skills that have made Robert Elegant one of the best-loved writers of our time.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Lucretia Barnes isn't looking for love. Recently divorced, she wants nothing more than to retreat from the intense and superficial millionaires of Hong Kong, but a chance meeting with the handsome Dorje Rabnet changes all that. From the moment they meet, the overpowering attraction between them is clear. Dorje, known as "Robbie" to his friends, is an Anglo-Tibetan engineer who shows Lucretia a part of Hong Kong she never knew existed: the vibrant, living city of fishmongers, street-sweepers, merchants, and monks who represent the true Hong Kong. As her appreciation for the city deepens, she finds the walls around her crumbling, replaced by a deep love for Robbie.

The city of Hong Kong dominates every line of this book. Robert Elegant, who served as an East Asian correspondent for Newsweek, knows the city inside and out and vividly brings it to life in Last Year in Hong Kong.

From Library Journal

Hong Kong in the last months before its transfer to China couldn't be a more current setting for a book, but the plot and writing of this one leave a lot to be desired. Lucretia Barnes, newly divorced, teaches art at the Chinese University. An unexpected meeting with Robbie, of British and Tibetan parentage, results in a passionate love affair that is threatened by Robbie's devotion to Buddhism and the Dalai Lama as well as by his grandmother's plans to marry him off. Elegant, author of From a Far Land (Random, 1987) and other works of fiction and nonfiction dealing with Asia, has written a disappointing novel filled with unconvincing characters and written in a style that makes it seem alternately like a breathless romance novel and a grade-school textbook on the evils of Chinese communism. Librarians would do better to steer readers to one of Elegant's early melodramas.
-?Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 225 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow & Co; 1st edition (May 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688148905
• ISBN-13: 978-0688148904
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #858,263 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Elegant only wrote this one for the $ - a poor novel, January 4, 1999

By 

hk-reader - See all my reviews

This review is from: Last Year in Hong Kong: A Love Story (Hardcover)

I did not have extremely high hopes when I bought this novel, but as an HK resident I can hardly resist a novel that is set in contemporary Hong Kong. But even my modest hopes were blighted.

Many things rang so false in this novel: Lucretia want to revive the arts in Hong Kong, but does she have anything to do with the Fringe Club (going strong for over 10 years) the Hong Kong Arts Centre, The Academy for Performing Arts?

She and her sweetie are now poor so they ride the unairconditioned bus to Repulse Bay... for almost the same amount of money they could have ridden an airconditioned double-decker, or a mini-bus (difference in price, about 25 cents US). They are not poverty stricken, and surveyors make good money.

Lucretia is working at the Chinese University way out in Sha Tin and living somewhere in mid-Levels. Nowhere in the book does she mention (or have it mentioned) what a horribly long commute that is - over an hour each way. (Minibus or walk to Central-> MTR to Kowloon Tong ->KCR to University -> walk to Campus). She gets a job when the Vice Chancellor of Chinese U calls her up and hires her? I'm sorry, but no one gets hired to teach in a university here without interview committees, etc.

The other thing that stuck in my craw is that there is no mention of the one thing that obsesses all my friends who are freelancing or just out of a job...her visa!

When she divorced her husband I presume her dependent's visa was no longer valid. How was she staying in Hong Kong? As a US Citizen she can stay for 3 weeks and then have to do the visa-run to Macao or ShenZhen and that is only OK for a few times. I have friends who when they lost a job spent tons of time and energy trying to get a work visa or find someone to write them a supporting letter as an employer. Elegant missed an opportunity to showing one of the true difficulties of life for unattached young foreigners in Hong Kong in the late 1990s.

As a native of Massachusetts I also found myself wondering how her schoolteacher father was able to afford their summers on Martha's Vineyard.

If you are looking for a good contemporary portrait of Hong Kong in the late 1990's, do not read this book. The love story aspect was also not very believable.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars absolutely awful, January 26, 1999

By 

lisatheratgirl "lisatheratgirl" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: Last Year in Hong Kong: A Love Story (Hardcover)

this is one of the poorest-written novels I have ever read, and I read 100 a year. flatliner characters, speaking in cliches, contradictions within paragraphs that make no sense, constant asking of rhetorical questions by the author through the characters, preachiness without any depth, and laughable sex scenes. sweaty bodies popping apart like champagne corks? the only saving grace that made me finish this was the descriptions of Hong Kong itself, showing the author at least knew something about the place. he should have written a travelogue. this is neither a political, historical or erotic novel. i dont believe i paid money for this.