Too Far From Antibes

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 NGAIO MARSH AWARD It is 1951, and Jean-Luc Gué ry has arrived in Indochina to investigate the murder of his brother, Olivier, whose body was found floating in a tributary of the Saigon River. As an avid reader of detective fiction, Gué ry is well aware of how such investigations should proceed, but it is not immediately clear that he is capable of putting this knowledge into practice. In addition to being a reporter for an obscure provincial newspaper, he is also a failed writer, an incorrigible alcoholic, and a compulsive gambler who has already squandered a fortune in the casinos of the Cô te d'Azur. Despite his dissolute tendencies, however, and his aversion to physical danger, Gué ry does eventually manage to solve the case. In order to do so, he is obliged to enter a world of elaborate conspiracies, clandestine intelligence operations, and organized crime - only to discover, in the novel's final pages, that the truth behind his brother's murder is far stranger than he could have imagined.

Bede Scott lives in Singapore, where he is an associate professor in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University. He is the author of On Lightness in World Literature (2013) and Affective Disorders: Emotion in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (2019).