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The Ballad of a Small Player

Condition: Standard Secondhand — £1.00
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SOON TO BE A MAJOR NETFLIX FILM, STARRING COLIN FARELL AND TILDA SWINTON

'I waited patiently for the next hand to be played out, and I had a feeling it was going to be a Natural, a perfect nine.'

His name is Lord Doyle.

His plan- to gamble away his last days in the dark and decadent casino halls of Macau.

His game- baccarat punto blanco -- 'that slutty dirty queen of casino card games.'


Though Doyle is not a Lord at all. He is a fake; a corrupt lawyer who has spent a career siphoning money from rich clients. And now he is on the run, determined to send the money - and himself - up in smoke.

So begins a beguiling, elliptical velvet rope of a plot- a sharp suit, yellow kid gloves, another naughty lemonade and an endless loop of small wins and losses. When Lady Luck arrives in the form of Dao-Ming, a beautiful yet enigmatic lost soul, so begins a spectacular and unnatural winning streak in which millions come Doyle's way. But in these shadowy dens of risk and compulsion, in a land governed by superstition, Doyle knows that when the bets are high, the stakes are even greater.

The Ballad of a Small Player is a sleek, dark-hearted masterpiece- a ghost story set in the land of the living, and a decadent morality tale of a Faustian pact made, not with the devil, but with fortune's fickle hand.

Format: Paperback
Published: 2015
Pages: 224
Publisher: Penguin Random House
ISBN: 9780099599685

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  • Poor Condition - Usually this will have a specific problem such as writing inside, water damage, missing dust jacket, heavy staining, large creases or cuts. These are readable copies but not nice ones. On other websites this condition is called 'Acceptable' or 'Fair' , but we want to be more honest.
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