Burdett, too, is from a humble background, at least by the standards of his native England. The son of a London cop, he traces his family back through carpenters and stonemasons on the eastern outskirts of London. There’s scant trace of a Cockney accent but the class consciousness and tinges of resentment of Britain’s stratified society remain; he no longer considers England home.

“They still ask you what your father did for a living at a perfectly ordinary dinner so they can establish what place you are in their Hindu caste system,” Burdett said as he clutched a glass of beer on ice, a combination, popular in Thailand, that might startle an Englishman of any class.

As a lawyer, Burdett earned a small fortune in Hong Kong. He quit law and now divides his time between Bangkok and a stone farmhouse on the banks of the Lot River in southwest France.

He often makes final revisions to his books in the veranda of his isolated French country home, with only oak forests, vineyards and sunflower fields to distract him. It’s difficult to imagine a place farther from the pulsating streets of Bangkok.

Bangkok’s bookshops are chock-a-block with bad bar-girl fiction. But Burdett stands out for his ability to blend convincingly details of the sex trade with food, superstition and global politics.

He delivers this grab-bag through his narrator, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a cop whose mother was a prostitute and father an American soldier during the Vietnam war. Sonchai is a cultural interpreter par excellence, a cross between Descartes and a Thai palm reader who has flashbacks of travels to Europe with his mother and her various clients-cum-sugar daddies.

The narrator’s frequent reflections on Buddhism complete the eclectic but coherent cultural mélange. Burdett himself meditates one or two hours a day.

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