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Literary genius

Mark Hughes

IT must be many a successful novelist's dream to abandon his publisher and go it alone with a book, confident in the knowledge that success will follow.

That is what Hong Kong-born author Timothy Mo, three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has done with his fifth novel due out in April. His last two novels sold 20,000 each in hardback but he says his relationship with Random House had become 'uneasy'.

Vanity publishing, as it is called, is usually the route of desperate writers turned down by a legion of companies.

Not one to mince his words, the modest author describes the book Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard as 'brilliant' and 'beautifully written' and containing 'some of the finest writing in English literature since D H Lawrence'. We shall see.

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