Emerging from Susan Johnson's hallucinatory evocation of late twentieth-century Hong Kong -- a fading colony bathed in neon, teeming with political and emotional refugees and evaporating dreams -- are the overlapping stories of two best friends and the man who comes between them. Rachel Gallagher is careful, inhibited, and achingly self-conscious. Anne-Louise Buchan is fearless, charismatic, and intent on wresting meaning from life's chaos. Polar opposites, they are bound together as artists hungering for experience. Martin James Bannister, exceptionally handsome, is a futures dealer with a talent for reinvention and a menacing hunger of his own.

Through this trio, Johnson explores the fragility of the unquiet mind and love's