My review of [book:The Glass Kingdom|53734187] by [author:Lawrence Osborne|56931]

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3184908131

So were the people in the book the main character or was it the Glass Kingdom, the apartment building in Bangkok the central subject. Its about Sarah, who has fled New York with a stash of cash for fancy new digs in Bangkok. Her friends are interesting, although I found the changing viewpoint and all the backstories a little confusing…. I just wanted to cut to the chase and figure out what happened. And as unrest grows outside the apartment building, the residents are stuck inside, and the beautiful building becomes a hiding place and a prison. It’s a pretty sinister book, and if I learned anything, it is not to leave a bloodstained nightgown in a washing machine if you may be implicated in a murder.

The Glass Kingdom is a large apartment complex that is slowly sliding into ruin. The same could be said of the people who rent there. Nobody is in any way kind or honest. They are all just a petty (or larger) crime away from disaster or reward. This could be compelling, but you are not given a reason to care one way or another for anyone involved. The ending is so underwritten that you really have no idea what has happened to most of the characters. Thank goodness, I really didn't care.

This was ten times better than I thought it was going to be. Creepy, tense and suspenful I had a hard time putting this book down. You'll love this moody and atmospheric story. A must read. Happy reading!

I will not be sharing feedback of this title in other places.
While I absolutely loved the synopsis of this book I ended up DNFing at 10% I just could not get into this book or relate to the characters.

Sarah arrived in Bangkok with a suitcase full of US dollars, having sold forged letters allegedly written by a literary goddess. Now, she's living in the Kingdom, a condo complex and she's met Mali, a mysterious young woman. Mali introduces her to Ximena, a chef, and Natalie, a hotel exec who also live in the building; they smoke ganja and drink, a lot. And then things get weird wrt to Mali. This is a very slow burn novel and for me, at least, the pay off remains murky. I love Bangkok as a city so I appreciated the atmospherics (the brief scenes outside the building, the way the city smells and so on). I was never able, however, to understand the layout of the Kingdom, which was almost a character in the story. Nor did I warm to any of the characters except Whisky the dog. As some points two povs appear in a single paragraph. At the same time, there's some wonderful phrasing. I wanted to like this but ultimately I found it frustrating. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. For Osborne fans and those who like literary thrillers.

Lawrence Osborne’s “The Glass Kingdom” will leave you feeling that you’ve traveled to Bangkok. He brilliantly calls up the sights, smells and tastes of the kingdom. You will want a shower after one of the frequent power failures leaves you sleeping on the balcony of your apartment.

A collection of drifters, con artists, greedy expats, and thieves come together in a decaying high-rise apartment complex called the Kingdom. Sarah, a young American, has escaped to Bangkok with a suitcase of stolen cash, and her fear, guilt, and loneliness are at the heart of the friendships she forms with other residents of the Kingdom. The Thai staff who work at the Kingdom are equally venal, as they spy on and steal from their employers.

I wanted more from the plot, and was disappointed in the ending, but I kept turning until the last page to find out what happened.

I’ve tried to read two other Lawrence Osborne books and failed. I like the idea of an Osborne book, and it begins well enough. But somewhere fairly early on in the book, it stops engaging me and then I either give up, or in the case of this Netgalley acquisition, I slog through to the end, growing crankier and crankier.

So <i>The Glass Kingdom</i> is about a shady apartment complex in Bangkok, where secrets run rampant, but is also an openly traded commodity. Everyone seems to be in everyone’s business. The maids have secret arrangements with employers, but they also will shaft them given the first opportunity. Grifters grift. But everyone also continues to be secretive, like they believe their business will stay hidden.

Sarah is the main character, who has come into money illegally and she decides Bangkok is the place to go to to hide. This, immediately, didn’t convince me. The book maintains that she decided upon Bangkok for some woolly reason. But it also maintains that Sarah was very calculated up until then. But suddenly, there she is in the Kingdom with zero planning skills. And she continues to drift, gets entangled with a number of ladies who gather to drink and play poker.

The book’s perspective is omniscient, so the reader is privy to everyone’s opinion. This hurts the book immensely because for one thing, we know exactly how foolish Sarah is being. The other, because even though we spend time in Sarah’s head, we hear the others speaking differently about her, and it’s always a shock when the writing about Sarah radically differs from another person’s opinion. Example: there is a point when Ximena comes in to check on Sarah, and there’s some awkwardness but nothing major until, Ximena says all of a sudden, that Sarah has lost her earlier hostility. But the trouble is that Sarah doesn’t come across as hostile at any point in the meeting. I didn’t really know how to square it.

So, long story. But ultimately this was disappointing.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Lawrence Osborne has a way of painting an indolent, creepy, and decadent cast of characters, mostly ex-pats, who reside in a once glorious but now decaying rental/condo unit in Thailand. The unit is likely a metaphor for the characters, each with their secrets and lies., their lives falling apart as the Thai government falls apart around them.

Sarah, an American, has stolen $200,000 and runs off from New York to Thailand until her trail is hopefully extinguished. She is a grifter of sorts, scheming to get what she wants at the expense of others. She knows that her money will go a long way in Thailand and she hopes to stay there long enough to make a clean getaway to somewhere else.

Sarah meets a woman at the condo's pool and she takes up with her and 2 other women, playing cards and drinking one night every week. Each of them has secrets, is running from something, and their plans are not on the up and up. What is happening is eerie for the reader sees the masks that each character wears and is even privy to their innermost secrets but those around them are only open to guessing. None of them trust one another.

The setting is dark and eerie. The structure of the building is such that you can see into others' apartments and hear what is going on. The four women share a maid who gathers personal information for her own benefit and makes money by selling secrets.

None of these characters is likable. Each carries a burden that could be viewed as remorseful, but they are narcissistic and psychopathic, without much conscience if any.

What is fascinating in Osborne's books, is that the character's grandiose plans usually don't go the way they anticipate. Gradually, things start to go down hill, what was supposed to be victorious starts t0 degenerate into something unplanned and often depraved.

The plot is a bit complex but I had no trouble following it. I rolled with the punches and slid downhill with the narrative. If you're unfamiliar with Osborne, now is the time to read his literature. You will not be disappointed.

A rich, creepy, superbly observed novel about invention and reinvention. THE GLASS KINGDOM shines with Lawrence Osborne's masterful hallmarks: acute character observation, a sly wit, and a superb sense of place. The pacing is deliberate...but the payoff is worth the wait.

"The Glass Kingdom" is filled with beautiful prose that often echoes the closed-in feeling of the narrative. Think Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr. Ripley" set in Bangkok meets Jim Thompson's "The Getaway." Perhaps no one is who you think they are. Sarah, perhaps doesn't reinvent herself as much as Mr. Ripley does, but her flights of fancy from a publishing assistant in New York City to new person entirely encsconced in the towers of the Kingdom in Bangkok speaks the same language.

There's literally no reason for Sarah's decisions. But going to a new city in a new country with a suitcase full of cold hard cash gives a person a chance to reinvent themselves and to become whoever they want to be. You can hide out in a huge complex shut off from the world and creatively master a past as you meet new acquaintances. Here Sarah hangs out, cut off from her past and without a future.

Nevertheless, like Dante's Inferno with the different levels of hell or like Thompson's The Getaway where Doc and Carol fall step by step into hell unable to escape their past, Bangkok for Sarah is no safe haven and, in the end, not even the magnificent towers are safe. Sarah is falling step by step into the circles of hell, each level more frightening than the last. And, eventually, she comes to understand that, in the master chess game being played, she is but a pawn, not a queen.

One of the things that makes Osborne's writing so intense is how the setting with the tropical storms and the ever-present geckos becomes almost another character in the story. And, as the power grid slowly fails as the protests in the streets grow more violent, the lack of air conditioning adds an additional element to the sweltering heat from which there is no escape. Indeed, for Sarah, her small world closes in and there is no escape and no succor and no paradise at the end of the rainbow.

I saw that another reviewer described The Glass Kingdom’s narrative as indolent, and that is an apt description. The novel offers plenty of atmosphere and occasionally lovely turns of phrase, but the plot creeps along at a languorous pace that (purposely?) matches the sticky, heat-soaked days during which the story takes place, and the inhabitants of the Kingdom felt to me more like sketches than fully realized characters. I did not enjoy this world, did not care about any of the characters, and found the ending unsatisfying. I DID feel transported to Thailand, and the book’s setting came alive for me, if not those who inhabited it.

I guess the moral of this story is: If you have a guilty conscience don’t go to Bangkok. Sarah has come into some money, not the old fashioned way. Thailand seems an appealing place to hide her time and Bangkok is where you can disappear in a wilderness of glass towers. Depravity loves company I guess and Sarah’s new posse are some of the most useless folks around. Too much time spent on the friends and the city itself. The narrative is indolent like its people. The payoff is unsurprising. Another lesson: under the bed, really?

Lawrence Osborne has been called a present day Graham Greene, and I'd have to agree. His world is one of sun soaked danger in a monsoon ravaged, politically unstable Thailand, in which a young American woman fugitive believes she can hide away. Other books I've read by Osborne carry this same haunted quality in which a naive protagonist is far out of their depth, and thinking they're ahead of the game, finds themselves getting more than they bargained for. Here, the Glass Kingdom, a crumbling, formerly luxurious collection of condos and apartments, is the setting with geckos on the walls and monitor lizards in the garden, and a population of ex-pats, former bargirls, and a willing staff, and who do you trust? Held me from page one right through to the end.

Going into a Lawrence Osbourne novel, his readers know two things: first, there’s bound to be an arrogant American who becomes unglued in an exotic culture and second, if there’s a lot of money involved, the tale is going to end badly.

And so it is with The Glass Kingdom. A young American named Sarah Mullins pulls a con job on a famous and aging author whom she befriends by selling her letters in Hong Kong and siphoning off a few hundred thousand dollars. Her plan is to lay low in Bangkok at a glass-fronted complex named the Kingdom, where the wealthier tenants live according to social hierarchy. There she befriends a half-Thai woman named Mali and her glamorous ex-pat friends.

Osborne writes, “…here life was in limbo. Things never evolved or progressed. It was a paradise of enforced mental idleness…It was a refuge, a prison, a fantasy, and a luxury living machine all at once.”

No one is precisely who they appear to be and evryone is on the take. Lawrence Osbourne is rightfully called the master of atmosphere, and The Kingdom and its outside environs are characters in their own right. The stultifying heat, the frequent and unexpected power outages, the reptilian underlayer of bats, lizards and geckos that roam the complex freely, the civil unrest, the air ripe with decaying mangos and other fruit—all of these contribute to the seductive and menacing ambiance that the author painstakingly creates.

The glass façade of the Kingdom belies the lack of transparency of its inhabitants, for whom Sarah is no match. From the first page to the gasp-worthy conclusion, The Glass Kingdom holds readers in its thrall. It has much to say about class and social distinctions, the sheer naivete of Americans, and the consequences of human greed.

I don’t think anyone does “expat lit” these days like Lawrence Osborne.

The Glass Kingdom was slow to take off, but once the scene was set, and the characters were in place in this novel.... If Osborne offers you a ride, get in. Even though it’s Bangkok, you’re alone, it’s getting dark, you don’t have any local currency, and you never know if your anxieties are unfounded or not... get in anyway. It’s Osborne. Things are always just....slightly off, in his exotic settings.

Osborne’s books are a technicolor insider look at expat subculture. Ominous lightning, the “shabby chic” vibe of the apartment complex — its plant-filled atrium and that humid, potted plant smell — it is all signature Osborne, and provides an almost theatrical setting for this book. Then, as always in good stories, a stranger comes to town, and...things happen.

It’s a complicated book, incorporating drama and gossip among a group of young women. The unlikable character trend, wow — makes me long for, I don’t know, Wilbur, or Winnie the Pooh? But then there’s the gossipy world inside and outside the book’s namesake apartment complex, loyalty versus betrayal...a few crimes, a backdrop of political upheaval. At times, yes, this book is as top-heavy as it sounds.

Some of the initial set-up for the main character was just — too contrived. And that ending (!!) - but as a few days passed, I began to think that it was really the only, inevitable conclusion.

I struggle with these morally compromised, unlikable characters — it’s hard to care much, either way, about any of them, or what happens to them.

I suppose it’s hard for any book to compete with real life these days. This one took effort, and a willingness to suspend readerly disbelief — but it was worth it, for the free trip to Bangkok, or this version of Bangkok. If Lawrence Osborne pulls up in a dubious car ... go ahead, get in. He knows all the best routes.

The Glass Kingdom. The book’s jacket description fails. They get it mostly wrong. It does take place in Bangkok. Otherwise, no. Indeed it is about a woman named Sarah, a modern day Daisy Miller. Osborne’s young American woman abroad is innocent, and yet she is an innocent with a secret. In making Sarah’s world, which is a series of residential towers in Bankok, Osborne writes a subtlety gripping work of paranoia, deceit, and subterfuge. He surrounds us with the heat, the trapped feeling of all of the participants. Even in his previous Cambodian novel, Hunters in the Dark, we do not feel so totally involved and participatory as in The Glass Kingdom.

Indeed, Osborne writes one of the best novels of place I have ever read. Bangkok is a hellish labyrinth for Sarah. Who do you trust? Who indeed is genuine? He creates a fatalism that clings like the heat and the mosquitos and the sudden rains. The novel recalls Hitchcock, and Malcom Lowery, Bowles, and Osborne’s own The Forgiven. The pitfalls have whirlpools; the quicksand has monsters that seem to offer safety and redemption but do not.

Like Sarah, we have false hope. But as we continue her journey –and those about her—we realize with horror the depth of her ever evolving problems.

No other work I have read this year has its depth and character. In other words, everything about the work is nigh perfect.

American Sarah Mullins has come to Bangkok, Thailand looking to hide away. She rents an apartment in the high-end complex called The Kingdom. She soon meets three other mysterious women there: the married Nat, who is a British hotelier; Ximena, the Chilean chef; and Mali, the most mysterious of them all. But political unrest causes upheavals and violence in the streets surrounding The Kingdom that begin to work their way inside the complex, causing feelings of unsafety for the residents and revealing its inhabitants’ secrets.

This is one of my favorite modern authors and he has not disappointed with this gem of a book. Mr. Osborne is a master at subtly creating uncomfortable, unsettling atmospheres that will send chills up your spine as you are pulled into his stories. He also is a master at describing settings that will pluck you right out of your easy chair and place you directly in the heart of the location, where you can clearly see each and every detail, smell each and every scent and odor, hear each and every sound. I lived in Bangkok every time I picked up this book. This authors’ books are completely unpredictable and I find them fascinating.

Do know that the book starts out slowly but don’t give up – there is much more here than there first appears. Excellent literary achievement digging deep into human morals.

Most highly recommended.