John Givens' (Korea 1967-60) famous novel now available as E-book

Concord ePress has republished John Givens (Korea 1967–69) novel,

 A Friend in the Police. Originally published in 1980 by Harcourt, Brace, you can now buy the ebook version at

Concord ePress: http://www.concordepress.com/a-friend-in-the-police/

 Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005WOG6DE

 The plot goes something like this: A middle-aged American businessman arrives in an unnamed Southeast Asian country to retrieve his wayward son. George Bates finds himself confronted by a climate and culture more bizarre than he could have anticipated, and by the mysterious Detective Sergeant Xlong, whose own background is even more tangled than the Americans and whose fecund language reflects the lush ambiguity of the tropical rain forest. Bates is soon lost in a complex, hallucinatory world that resembles a rewrite of The Heart of Darkness by Franz Kafka.

A Friend in the Police is often spoken of by veteran authors as the book they wish they had written. Newly revised by the author, this Concord ePress ebook is the first widely available edition of an admired cult novel.

Here’s what other writers have to say about the novel —

A Friend in the Police suggests a parody of Conrad and Graham Greene by Nathanael West: its an exhilarating novel, an important satire, a comic vision phrased in energetic and constantly surprising prose. — John Hawkes

Somehow, John Givens moves from Waughs world to Conrads. That he could do so without visibly changing gears, or without forsaking his highly charged language, seems to me a very neat trick indeed. — Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek

The jungles of Southeast Asia, sleazy bars filled with B-girls, and Communist guerrillas form the backdrop of John Givenss A Friend in the Police. Givens evokes a fresh and powerful sense of the character of the place and its people. — John Thomas Stovall, Chicago Tribune