Saint Jack: A Novel

Jack Flowers knew he needed to shake things up when he jumped into the Straits of Malacca and hitched a ride to Singapore. Deftly identifying the fastest route to fame along the seedy port, Jack starts hiring girls out to lonely tourists, sailors, bachelors — anyone with some loose change and a wandering eye — soon making enough money to open two pleasure palaces. But just as Jack is finally coming into his own, a shocking tumble toward the brink of death leaves him shaken, desperate to pull himself up to greatness. Depressed and vulnerable, he’s quick to do business with Edwin Shuck, a powerful American working to take down an unsuspecting general. Marked with Paul Theroux’s trademark biting humor and audacious prose, Saint Jack is a gripping work from an award-winning author. |

"Paul Theroux is without peer as the merciless obituarist of colonialism. He knows his way matchlessly about the milieu where no-one was ever at home, while having forgotten any other home. Dunroamin, a whore-house that is the pride of Jack Flowers, the 'Saint Jack' of his latest novel, is its perfect expression. Theroux novels are neither apologia nor accusation; wit is his rare medium, and that lays both bare." —Nadine Gordimer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature