{"product_id":"9780571317547","title":"The Bell-Boy","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Bell-Boy\u003c\/i\u003e was James Hamilton-Paterson's third novel, first published in 1990.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e'Somewhere on my tropical travels I encountered a rickety hotel on whose roof an ancient servant lived in a converted hen coop. This gave me the idea for a young bell-boy, Laki, who is up from the provinces and lives on top of his hotel in the holy city of Malomba. He moonlights as a shrewd guide for foreign visitors, his latest clients being a hippie English family who are in Malomba for psychic surgery. Their mutual exploitation leads to both farce and minor tragedy.' James Hamilton-Paterson\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e'A brilliant religious satire with elements of E.F. Benson and Evelyn Waugh... Few books since E.M. Forster's \u003ci\u003eA Passage to India \u003c\/i\u003e(whose formal perfection this novel shares) have conveyed more intensely the allure (and the revulsion) the East holds for Westerners.' \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Faber and Faber","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47124382056688,"sku":"9780571317547","price":18.49,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780571317547_p0.jpg?v=1763719502","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780571317547","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}