by Timothy Mo

Timothy Mo was born in Hong Kong in 1950 to a Chinese father and an English mother who divorced soon after his birth. When Mo was ten, he moved to England to live with his mother, where he later received a B.A. degree in history from Oxford University and studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia. While Mo, who speaks and writes little Chinese, considers his novels to address matters of universal significance, those larger issues are framed by issues that reflect his dual Chinese and European background. His first novel, The Monkey King (1978), is set in Hong Kong in the 1950s and features a half-Chinese, half-Portuguese main character who slowly comes to value the mixed heritage that he at first despises. Most of Mo’s later books—An Insular Possession (1986), The Redundancy of Courage (1991), and Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard (1995)—are...