Excerpt from The Ballad of a Small Player by Lawrence Osborne, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The rain continued as if nothing had happened, and deep within myself I was sure that I would see her again, because although the city is a reef where the confused fish never meet twice unless a goddess intervenes, intervene she sometimes does. Solitude and loss are the rule, and years go by before one realizes it, but one can always meet a woman twice in a city. It's not like living on the mainland, lost among the billions. There are hundreds of Dao-Mings, and thousands of Tangs, but a connection made is a connection never forgotten, or almost not forgotten, and one day, I was sure, I would once again find the girl who generously gilded the deer of Sando.

Excerpted from The Ballad of a Small Player by Lawrence Osborne. Copyright © 2014 by Lawrence Osborne. Excerpted by permission of Hogarth Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.