'Lyrical and atmospheric. As the influence of the West falls away, an unnamed narrator drifts through the East’s floating world of non-places – chain hotels, airports, mega-cities – finalising often covert operations and deals. When he meets the enigmatic and beautiful Tien, a 21st-century floating world courtesan, he becomes involved with people and events that threaten his plan to escape life via various forms of oblivion.
'Evocative and sparely written, in the tradition of The Mary Smokes Boys, this is a novel where the journey becomes the story, filled with acute observation, desire and dreams.' (Publication summary)
'He wakes in a city, briefly unsure which one. Already adrift. They have all begun to look alike, possessing the same anonymous modern functionality. Characterless, sleek. Architectural Esperanto, he calls it, ‘anonymous, with nothing to exclaim but their speed of construction and size’. His day is business: Asian multinationals, large sums of money. A curious vagueness to proceedings – the bigger the sums, the more abstract the work. He is little more than an intermediary. Home is an interchangeable hotel room on a high floor, but there’s always some trust-fund entrepreneur or high-powered businessman to remind him of his place. Night is drinking, piano bars, women of the night. Time itself is a kind of fluid construct, landing nowhere in particular. (‘No tense. Like the airports, what was is and will be.’) Only one place of possible return matters to him, and one courtesan there. Saigon. Tien. He is nameless and will remain so beyond the novel’s final page.' (Introduction)
'Oblivion locates itself primarily inside non-places: airports, bars, hotels—places for forgetting and being forgotten. Places that are not quite the country that they occupy, but an ‘architectural Esperanto’ designed for speed and size. The world of the novel is a ‘floating world’, a world of foreign investment and trade superimposed onto Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Japan, and Vietnam.' (Introduction)
'In Patrick Holland’s new literary thriller, an unnamed narrator drifts through the glittering non-places of Asian modernity – chain hotels, airports, megacities – brokering million-dollar trade deals and engaging reluctantly in light espionage. At night, he checks into hotel rooms in interchangeable cities, and pursues “chance liaisons” with exotic, unknowable women, before courting oblivion with whisky and opium.' (Introduction)
'The unnamed narrator of Patrick Holland’s Oblivion begins the novel contently, if not happily adrift. An Australian nominally based in Beijing, he works in either trade or diplomacy, and spends his time travelling between Asian megacities.'
'Holland's latest novel is the antithesis to a high-octane thriller.'
'Patrick Holland grew up in Outback Queensland but his latest novel is set among the glittering towers of the Far East.'
'Holland's latest novel is the antithesis to a high-octane thriller.'
'The unnamed narrator of Patrick Holland’s Oblivion begins the novel contently, if not happily adrift. An Australian nominally based in Beijing, he works in either trade or diplomacy, and spends his time travelling between Asian megacities.'
'In Patrick Holland’s new literary thriller, an unnamed narrator drifts through the glittering non-places of Asian modernity – chain hotels, airports, megacities – brokering million-dollar trade deals and engaging reluctantly in light espionage. At night, he checks into hotel rooms in interchangeable cities, and pursues “chance liaisons” with exotic, unknowable women, before courting oblivion with whisky and opium.' (Introduction)
