Interview with Radio Qué Onda
I was interviewed by Wellington’s Spanish language radio program Qué Onda. I talked about China, including my time in Wuhan, Argentina, and my book Buenos Aires Triad.
novel
Unwelcome
Unwelcome by Quincy Carroll My rating: 5 of 5 stars In ‘Unwelcome’ we follow Cole Chen through his awkward misadventures in California and Changsha, China. The twenty-three-year-old has come back from his second stint in China and is crashing on his brother’s couch. Our introduction to Cole is through the eyes of his more successful …
Buenos Aires Triad Chapter 1
THE SPOTTER A phalanx of drivers waited at the front of the arrivals hall. Standing with the others, Lucas had a sign for a certain Jorge Martínez: a passenger who would never arrive. Lucas was there to make an important decision, not to drive somebody into town. He thought it would be agony to choose. …
Eyes Wide Shut: Malaparte in China
Originally published in the Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel as When Malaparte Met Mao. A former fascist sees only the good in Mao’s China. In 1956 Italian novelist Curzio Malaparte received an invitation to travel to Beijing for a commemoration of the death of writer Lu Xun. Malaparte is most famous for his …
Q & A with Michael Botur
Was a pleasure to do Q & A with NZ author @MichaelBotur. His novel ‘Crimechurch’ was a great read. We discussed my book ‘Buenos Aires Triad’ and stuff related to writing. Read the full article here.
Graham Greene Reviews
As a teenager, I read ‘The Comedians’ and in my twenties ‘The Power and the Glory’, ‘The Quiet American’ and ‘The Human Factor’. I remember swapping my copy of The Quiet American for ‘Off the Rails in Phnom Penh’ when in Laos. The Human Factor I read in a hostel in Colombia. In my early …
A Review of Buenos Aires Triad
A review from Carlos Hughes, author of White Monkey: What’s an honest man to do for a living when they live in a country where inflation rises up by 20% overnight and the price of bread becomes an expensive commodity? This is the dilemma of the main protagonist ‘Lucas’ in the wonderfully written crime noir …
The Xiezhi Triad in Argentina
A few years ago, the police in Buenos Aires busted a Chinese mafia group known as the Pixiu Triad. I wrote about this group and its activities in my article published in the LA Review of Books, China Channel. Inspired by those real events, I chose the xiezhi to be the symbol of the Chinese …
A Certain Kind of Power
‘A Certain Kind of Power’ is an entertaining dissection of corruption, in which Australian author Ryan Butta recreates an Argentina of scandals and cloak and dagger moves. Our guide in the county’s capital, Buenos Aires, is Mike Costello, a jaded American corporate spy. An aging one-time army man, Mike has been in Argentina too long …
Harvest Season
This novel successfully captures the backpacker scene in China’s Yunnan Province in the 2000s. However, the main characters are not backpackers per se but travellers who never want to go home. The fictional setting, Shuangshan, is – I think – based on Dali, a town by the beautiful Erhai Lake. Yunnan is home to many …