The Redundancy Of Courage

Adolph Ng, an effete, Canadian-educated hotel owner of Chinese origin, leads a placid existence on Danu, the eastern half of an island to the north of Australia.

He and his companions - the fiery and radical Rosa Soares, the quiet but formidable Dr Maria Nolasco da Silva, the clever but dissatisfied Raoul Garcia, and the dignified ex-seminarian Martinho Oliveira - meet in the cafes and bars to trade salacious gossip and forge the policies of FAKOUM, the government of their newly-independent homeland.

Timothy Peter Mo's works have won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). Mo was also the recipient of the 1992 E. M. Forster Award. Since 1994, when he rejected a £125,000 advance from Random House for his next novel, he has self-published his books under the label Paddleless Press. Three of his novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.