The invasion marks the end of the British Empire and the reversal of all accepted values.  The social order which has long been established in Hong Kong begins to disintegrate.  The main characters engage on a journey of self-discovery and their world falls apart.  Their once apparently happy and perfect lives are shown to be shallow, hopeless facades behind which there is nothing but failure, self-denial and cowardice.

About the Author: Paul House currently lives in Spain.  He has published a number of other fiction novels with Lulu.com including  A Little Folding of the Hands to Sleep, And They Pluck Out Your Eyes, Common Places, Dust Before the Wind, Trivial Pursuit and Sooner Than Gold.

Excerpt from the book:

“As she looked down over the city and watched the puffs of black smoke rising over Kowloon, Chen Liew’s words came back to her.  The Japanese will kill him now.  It was like a death sentence.  Chen Liew had spoken.  A pact might have been made with the Japanese.  Chen Liew had decided that Laughton would die and that was what would happen.  Chen Liew was never wrong.  The Japanese would kill him.

‘I will not lose him a second time,’ she said.  But before she was able to begin to think how she would escape from her husband, she noticed that various squadrons of planes were coming towards her.  They were flying high over Kowloon, too high to be going to bomb it.  As she watched, the planes flew past the mainland and out over the harbour where they banked and began to descend towards the city of Victoria.  Tung Nien saw the first bombs fall on Central.

The city of Victoria lay exposed and defenceless on the north-western shore of the island.  The so-called fortress was bombed systematically for four days and four nights.  As the factories, oil storage tanks and paper thin tenement buildings went up in flames, the civilians fled into the streets and, as the streets crowded and filled, more bombs rained down until vast areas of the city became awash with heaps of mangled and blood-soaked bodies.

Laughton had wandered dazed and disgusted through the carnage until, forced on by the terrified pushing of hundreds of people he did not know, he took refuge with them in the granite hills behind the city.  There he huddled with them and listened and watched the bombs raining down.  His first initial surge of love, his hopes to see Tung Nien again had been slowly battered out of him as the days dragged on and the planes continued to come with their cargo of explosives.  He felt empty, incapable of doing anything anymore.”

-- END

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:

Paul House (author)

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A copy of HARBOUR can be ordered from Amazon at:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Harbour-Paul-House/dp/1435700570/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206276732&sr=8-1