The Flagman

A novella that captures the precise moment when one era dies and another is born, told through the eyes of a man rebuilding himself amid the wreckage of his own choices.

The Flagman follows the journey of Guy Acheson, recovering from his failed marriage, to Cheung Chau Island in 1997—just as Hong Kong is counting down to its handover to China. There, with the assistance of Jane, a sharp-eyed woman who appears at the exact moment opportunity knocks, he discovers an unexpected niche: colonial flags for a city saying goodbye to empire.

Guy moves through a cast of rogues and expatriates—a French chandelier salesman delivering aphorisms, a Finnish man with an increasingly complicated relationship to clothing, a rat of improbable size and apparent sentience—all orbiting the fixed point of Morocco's bar and the approaching ceremony that will make his flags world-famous, if only for a moment.

But beneath the humour lies something genuinely moving: a portrait of a man learning, through small acts and unexpected relationships, that damage is not destiny, and that some lives matter not because they are remembered, but because they change something in the world before vanishing.