From a Wall Street Journal review by Tom Nolan of the book by Lawrence Osborne titled “On Java Road”:

The narrator of Lawrence Osborne’s latest novel, “On Java Road,” is Adrian Gyle, an English journalist who has lived for two decades in Hong Kong. “I’m a dreary person’s dreary person,” he says of himself. But his home base, which until recently felt “as if time had stood still since about 1970,” is suddenly much livelier and dangerous, with violent protests in the streets as the Chinese impose stricter controls over the populace.