Foreign writers often come to Hong Kong to moderate the conversation on 'East meets West'. When they struggle to understand or control that dialogue, the meeting tends to be tweaked into more of a collision. The writer steps back to watch the cultures clash, fuelling the explosion with as many historical flashpoints, natural disasters and exotic sexual practices as the page or screen can contain.
Anne Berry makes no apology for exploiting the colour of her childhood home in her debut novel, The Hungry Ghosts. 'Hong Kong is a small island but in that space you are exposed, visually, to so many extremes ... I don't think I've ever visited a place with so many extremes,' she says from England. 'Growing up there, I thought it was a constant feast of different experiences.'
Her novel is a minefield of cultural explosions - and the few Chinese characters in it have little ammunition. But as the fall-out rains down on her British characters as they struggle to maintain their colonial standing, they reach out to Hong Kong. Rather than trying to contain the place, they seek a return to the Hong Kong they lived in, which has been erased by progress and personal tragedy.
Her two central characters inhabit the same body. In the opening pages, Lin Shui is raped and killed by a Japanese soldier during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong in the second world war. She becomes a ghost haunting an abandoned army hospital for 25 years until Alice Safford, the lonely daughter of a senior British civil servant, appears.
The ghost possesses Alice and narrates much of the book. The point of view is shared by many characters, though not Alice, who runs away from her troubled family to England and France before returning to Hong Kong as a middle-aged woman in 2007.
As her misfortunes increase, Alice becomes the host for a cabal of grotesque ghosts. The novel accelerates from a study of colonial personality types with a hint of Oriental mysticism to a genre approaching science fiction.