Archive for the ‘Expats’ Category

Review: 'The Expats' is excellent spy thriller

"The Expats" (Crown), by Chris Pavone: Chris Pavone channels spy-fiction superstars Robert Ludlum and John le Carre in his amazing first novel, "The Expats."

Kate Moore leaves her double life as a wife and mother and a covert operative in the CIA when her husband, Dexter, gets a new job in Luxembourg. She tries to be a stay-at-home mom (her husband had no idea of her job working for the CIA), and though her former bosses aren't concerned, she's worried that her past will come back to haunt her.

Soon her new life as an expat begins to unravel.

Kate meets a friendly pair from America, and the two couples start spending time together. Dexter practically lives at the office and becomes increasingly obsessed with work. Bored and a bit concerned Kate's old instincts kick in, and she begins to investigate her husband and their new friends. It doesn't take long for her to discover that Dexter's job isn't what she thought it is, and that he might be responsible for the theft of a huge sum of money. Kate also discovers evidence that the American couple are assassins and that she and Dexter are their next targets.

"The Expats" is a skillful and atmospheric descent into paranoia. Kate's journey as her life falls apart is compelling, and the novel is impossible to put down. Pavone invokes memories of the great writers of spy fiction of the past, and he has the chops to be mentioned with the best of them.

___

Online:

http://www.chrispavone.com/

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Review: 'The Expats' is excellent spy thriller

Tokyo Expats Live in Altered Landscape

Jacinthe Martin says it took her a few days to reach panic status last March, as Japans nuclear crisis deepened following its earthquake and tsunami. But the agitated news reports and frantic emails from friends finally pushed her like many foreign residents of Tokyo to abandon her adopted city for sanctuary overseas.

Toshifumi Kitamura | AFP | Getty Images

You dont see many expats at the supermarket, she says. One neighbor, they never came back, not even to close the house. They just sent a mover.

The exodus from Japan of people who had obvious places to go generated its own term: flyjin, a cross between fly and gaijin, the Japanese word for foreigner. Immigration statistics show that in March 2011, 270,000 more non-Japanese left the country than entered it.

Many of the flyjin are long back, after waiting out the fraught first weeks of the crisis at home or in places such as Hong Kong or Singapore. Yet not everyone has returned: the lower numbers are evident not only in emptier foreign-food aisles, but in shrunken international school enrolments and depressed rents on expatriate-oriented housing. Ms Martins neighbor's house, for instance, is renting for 20 per cent less than it did before its previous occupants fled.

Among the returnees, meanwhile, there has been the sometimes tricky process of getting back to normal not only at home but at work, where companies have learnt tough lessons about the trade-offs involved in evacuating non-local staff. When we came back, there were difficulties in terms of a few odd comments and stuff, says Stephen Brierley, a British currency-swaps trader at a Japanese financial firm.

About 30 per cent of the traders on his floor are foreigners, he says: they went to Hong Kong for a week, while their Japanese colleagues stayed put.

A manager at one Swiss-based company says he was told not to let his Japanese colleagues know he was out of the country, to avoid damaging morale a ruse that seems unlikely to have fooled them. Everyone knows that all the gaijin left, says a Japanese IT specialist at a US consulting firm.

When they returned, many were put through a regimen of corporate group-building exercises designed to smooth over any rifts with colleagues such as company-sponsored golf weekends. A few businesses went further, linking team spirit with volunteer efforts in Japans tsunami-stricken north-east. That was a real game-changer, says a foreign manager who spent a weekend shoveling muck and picking up debris. My relationship with the team here, and their view of us, changed dramatically for the better.

As for the decline in expat numbers, it has been oddly uneven across nationalities, with continental Europeans the mostly likely to have stayed away a reflection, perhaps of differing attitudes towards nuclear power and radiation risks. Enrolment at a school for German children in Yokohama, just south-west of Tokyo, is still down by 25 per cent, while parents at Tokyos French Lyce report a similar fall there. At the British School numbers are down just 5 per cent.

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Tokyo Expats Live in Altered Landscape

'The Expats:' A book review

The Expats Chris Pavone Crown, 326 pp., $26

Reviewed by Vince Cosgrove

Consider some varied approaches to thriller writing: the breathless prose rich with exclamation points and buffed agents dodging bullets as they bounce about acrobatically like performers at Cirque du Soleil (the Bourne novels); the cerebral, weblike puzzle cracked through a patient and manipulative investigation brushed with moral expediency (Le Carrs George Smiley books); a sympathetic bystander thrust into a dangerous plight he or she solves only as the pages dwindle (take your pick of authors, for so many mine that Hitchcockian schtick).

Now consider Chris Pavones debut novel, The Expats: a minimum of if any exclamation points and gymnastics, but propelled by clear writing that delivers you to the next revelation; a seemingly simple plot that mutates into a complicated, perhaps a tad too complicated, affair; a mother (this time, hardly innocent) who thinks she understands all, only to realize in the waning pages that more shocks await.

Which means Pavone has written a refreshingly original thriller, melding the best the genre offers with his own style and approach, part Ludlum in the pacing, part Le Carr in the complexity of story and character, but mostly Chris Pavone, a former book editor who obviously learned through experience.

A reviewer should never reveal much of a thrillers plot, for wheres the joy in reading the book after youve read a detailed outline? Heres all you need: Kate Moore, a happily married mom of two young boys, moves with her computer-expert husband Dexter to Luxembourg, where he has a new job. There they meet an American couple, Julia and Bill, whose initial affability soon triggers Kates suspicions. Kate keeps a secret from Dexter, and as the tale progresses, Kate begins to wonder if hard-working, dependable Dexter doesnt have a secret, too. A big secret.

Pavone has a Rick Steves-like talent for describing Luxembourg and its environs, so much so that you might like to travel there yourself. Hes also expert at observing the expats, many of them rich bankers who arrogantly flaunt their wealth with their platinum watches and alligator wingtips, their stretch denim and silk-cotton blends. ... Money: earning it, spending it. Eating it, drinking it, wearing it.

The novel could have been leaner; there are paragraphs throughout that add little to the tale. And the final explanations are Byzantine to the point of wishing for CliffsNotes. But at novels end, you appreciate Pavone for crafting a thriller so good that you wonder what other ideas he has up his cloak, right alongside the obligatory dagger.

Vince Cosgrove is a writer based in Berkeley, Calif.

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'The Expats:' A book review

Expats Living Rough In The Philippines Part 4 – Video

02-03-2012 06:04 Expats Living Rough In The Philippines Part 4

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Expats Living Rough In The Philippines Part 4 - Video

All work, all play: Bali expats

Garrie McCreddin, wife Karen and daughters Isabella, 5, Charlotte, 3, and Mackenzie, 18 months, in Bali. Photo: Jason Childs

HOW'S this for a lurk? Garrie McCreddin dropped out of school at 16 and now, aged 33, he earns a salary of $190,000 in the hand. He gets six months holiday and spends his downtime surfing at Bali's secluded Echo Beach, where he lives with his wife and three kids - and their four servants.

Until a few years ago Mr McCreddin, who works as a driller on an exploratory oil and gas rig - currently drilling off China - based himself in Perth. But he, like hundreds of Australians who work in mines and on resource projects in WA, NT and in Asia, has decided to live in Bali, rather than Australia.

The itinerate nature of Bali suits the lifestyle of these fly-in, fly-out workers. There are now 16 or 17 flights every day from Perth to Bali, 11 each week from Darwin and two from Port Hedland, making it possible for miners to work in Australia and commute to Bali.

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Miners such as 25-year-old Dylan Coles, who is employed as an engineer in the remote Savannah nickel mine in the East Kimberley. At the end of his two-week shift, Coles flies back to Bali where he lives with his Javanese girlfriend. The cost of his commute, from Darwin to Bali, is less than $3000 a year. His annual rent is just $2000. Unsurprisingly, he saves half his $125,000 salary.

In Mr McCreddin's case, there were several reasons for his move. One was lifestyle - he can indulge his passion for surfing and still drop off and pick up the kids from school. Tax was another reason. His company pays tax in whichever country he is based. In 2009 a change in the tax law meant he would have to pay the difference between the Australian rate and the local rate. He decided to move and says there are hundreds of other Australians working in the mining and resource sector across Asia who have done the same.

''I can't see us going back to Perth,'' he says as he looks out from a cafe across Echo Beach. ''I just can't see it.''

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All work, all play: Bali expats