What he has to say about the city is complex and thoughtful and has all the makings of a great, epic story. Julian Trevelyan ‘Trevelyan was brilliantly inventive and possessed a wit and innocence of eye that could discover enchantment in the most mundane scenes’.

But what these films preserve is a largely lost Hong Kong, a city whose recent past is vanishing and whose ever-shifting landscape is fading from recognition. First held in 2002, the 24 Hour Charity Dinghy Race was conceived by Roger Eastham and Mark Houghton and drew 16 entries. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. The apparently important bit- part of a poet named Wilfred Austen, who is quite like his near-namesake Wystan Auden, does seem a bit gratuitous, but the author enjoyed it and pays his debt to pleasure. The book is in a near fine unclipped dust jacket which is in an archival sleeve and has very light creasing here and there.The pictures reference the child’s perspective, whilst the words are in the idiomatic style of a kind yet pedagogic parent, one who instinctually knows what might appeal, yet also wishes to be informative. John Lanchester's Fragrant Harbor presents a traditional colonial narrative set in the 1930s and 1940s inside a larger, dizzyingly complex tale of big business at the turn of the 21st century.

John Lanchester was brought up in Hong Kong and this story about a man who travels from England to Hong Kong before the second world war and lives the rest of his life there is very well told with enough twists and turns and surprises to keep you on your toes. The narrative, loosely bound together by this plot, contains a good deal that is not obviously relevant to its unfolding. The complacency of colonial life in the 1930s; the horrors of the Japanese occupation during World War II; and the post-war boom and transformation of Hong Kong all surface in this epic novel.Writing with the same fine style and observant eye that distinguished his previous novels, John Lanchester depicts a tumultuous time and place and then peoples it with extraordinary characters. Lanchester intertwines personal histories and the city's history with great skill, showing how the past lives on, even in a city as resolutely modern as Hong Kong. After school he continued to pursue his interest in the arts, working as a commercial artist but also, foreshadowing his later occupation, as model and furniture maker, before studying what would become his main concern, architecture, at Regent Street Polytechnic (1938-41). It made me really long to go to Hong Kong (or Fragrant Harbour which is its chinese name) and I subsequently did!