ONCE UPON A TIME IN HONG KONG

Dennis Lehane's LIVE BY NIGHT meets Ang Lee's LUST, CAUTION in WWII Hong Kong. An epic gangster novel and a sex-charged spy thriller.

*Nominated for the Taiwan Literary Award
*Author of the Year by Eslite Bookstore Hong Kong
*China Reading Post 15 Best Literary Titles of 2016
*Asia Weekly Top 10 Chinese Novels of the Year
*Winner of the Taipei Book Fair Award 2017

LIVE BY NIGHT meets LUST, CAUTION in WWII Hong Kong

Running away from a life of poverty and sexual abuse in southern China, Luk Pa-Choi arrives in Hong Kong a penniless nobody. He earns a living by pulling a ricksaw, he learns English from prostitutes and even acts as bouncer for brothels.
Fate brings him into the world of Chinese secret society, and soon Luk is given the order to start a branch in Hong Kong. He falls in love with Morris Davidson, a British police officer. Their clandestine affair is both business and pleasure: the gangster and the police feeding each other information, as well as seeking sexual comfort. Everything changes when the Japanese army takes over Hong Kong, and the British forces are sent to the prison. Luk must serve a different master now while he desparately tries to rescue Davidson. As the war rages on, he will soon discover the ultimate betrayal and the price of love......

Set in the tumultuous period of WWII and Japanese occupation, ONCE UPON A TIME IN HONG KONG tell the story of a young Chinese gangster's dramatic rise in Hong Kong's underworld and his forbidden love affair with a British police officer. Meticulously researched and artfully told, it is at once a crime epic, a heart-wrenching love story, and a sex-charged spy thriller.

Ma Ka-Fai has a cosmopolitan background: he grew up in Hong Kong, studied Psychology at National Taiwan University, and obtained his Master and PhD in Sociology in the US (U of Chicago and U of Wisconsin). He had worked in advertisement, publishing, newspaper, and film industry and currently teaches media and creative writing at City University of Hong Kong.

He has published over 20 books of essays, many of them bestsellers. ONCE UPON A TIME IN HONG KONG is his debut novel and first work of fiction. He is fluent in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese and has over 1.3 million followers on Weibo (Chinese Twitter).

For the past thirty years, Ma Ka-Fai is known as one of the most popular columnists in Hong Kong and enjoys the reputation of a literary rock star. Now, with his first novel, he joins the ranks of Mai Jia, Chan Koonchung, and Chan Ho-Kei as a master storyteller from the Chinese world.

It is certainly an ambitious project: ONCE UPON A TIME IN HONG KONG is the first of a trilogy set in Hong Kong's underworld from before WWII to the 1970s, about two brothers from southern China who become gangsters and spies in a city ruled by British, Japanese, Chinese Nationalist and Communist forces.

Published in June, ONCE UPON A TIME IN HONG KONG is an instant success, hitting the bestseller lists and has been reprinted five times. Film rights were sold to director Johnnie To even before publication, who plans to make the film based on the third book in the trilogy, set in the 1970s