Number One on his list:The Quiet American by Graham GreeneRead about the other nine tales on Pryce's list.
Ostensibly it is about the eponymous quiet American – a naive and idealistic CIA agent in Saigon during the French colonial war of the 50s. But what lingers is the relationship between the world-weary newspaper correspondent, Fowler, and his beautiful girl Phuong. Greene perfectly skewers the superfluity of western notions of love that invariably inform such situations. Undermining the idyll is the mercenary elder sister, painfully aware of the need to use Phuong's beauty to secure a provider for the family while her beauty still has currency.
The Quiet American also made novelist Catherine Sampson's top ten list of Asian crime fiction.
--Marshal Zeringue
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