20 August 2026

Down and out in Anatolia

Nobody writes about drink, drugs and dissolution like Lawrence Osborne does

Photo by Xavier vanlaere/ Millennium images, UK

Following literary careers is a bit like watching a tightrope walker on a high wire. At first you’re convinced they will make it across. Then you become terrified they’ll fall. And if they’re still on the wire after several books, you find yourself wondering what it would be like if they did fall off. All of which is to say that authors are meant to have ups and downs, years of bounty followed by fallow seasons, stellar hits, crash-outs and comebacks.

What then to make of Lawrence Osborne? Since the publication of The Forgiven in 2012, the British writer has written seven novels and a collection of short stories without putting a foot wrong. And along with an oeuvre he has developed a sensibility. An Osbornian novel is of a type: a noir-ish moral thriller set in an exotic locale populated by washed-up Westerners who drink and make merry and then make life-altering decisions. His books are invariably published in summer with beach-friendly jackets – and they do go down easily enough. Although when that ill-advised third ouzo wakes the reader up in the middle of the night, they may find themselves dwelling on the dilemmas conjured up in Osborne’s pages as they toss and turn in bed. That residual unease is his literary calling card.

So it is with Children of Wolves. Osborne’s latest novel is set primarily in Turkey and follows Tyler Sedgwick, an American private investigator sent to track down the prodigal daughter of one of his plutocratic countrymen. Tyler finds her at a luxury hotel in Bodrum with a coterie of friends. He likes what he sees. Chana Knight is Turkish-American, “bilingual, bicultural… able to slip between places and societies with ease”. She’s beautiful, intelligent, spoilt, manipulative, and up to something. Tyler makes contact, identifies her and tells her father where to pick her up.

Except he doesn’t. Attracted to her and wanting to spin out his trip to Turkey on another man’s dollar, Tyler sits on his discovery and pursues an affair with Chana. He also insinuates himself into her circle of shiftless, jaded trust-fund kids, who it turns out are neither as feckless nor as docile as they first appear. There is substance to their radical posturing and purpose behind their interest in him. As the novel unfolds it becomes apparent that Chana’s crew are planning a terror attack – the assassination of the Trump-appointed American consul in Istanbul – and are using Tyler to help get them close to their target.

The thematic seam Osborne has mined in his other novels has been the cross-cultural confusion produced by globalisation and the dramatic possibilities presented by the arrival of WEIRD travellers in Thailand, Cambodia, Morocco and Macau. Children of Wolves represents a departure as it dwells on intergenerational, not intercultural, conflict. We are invited to scrutinise Chana and her circle for motive. Indeed, much of the last third of the novel is spent guessing at what drives them. Politics? Narcissism? Daddy issues? These speculations are larded with allusions to internet culture, and mentions of “normies”, “zizians”, “cucks” and Luigi Mangione abound.

This is all good fun, but it lacks the touch of the master watchmaker that gives his best novels such brilliant dramatic coherence. Osborne has always inserted ambiguity into his plots, but in Children of Wolves ambiguousness has given way to inconclusion. It seems that the worldview of the “global golden youth” is harder to comprehend than even the most alien foreign culture. One feels Osborne’s exasperation coming through the page. What are Chana and her lot up to? The reader closes the book none the wiser and one suspects Osborne is not sure himself. Admittedly, this uncertainty is true to life, but it is false to storytelling.

Structural shortcomings aside, Children of Wolves is a rich and enjoyable book. Nobody writes about drink, drugs and dissolution like Osborne does. The literary flourishes are suavely done and the lean prose is punctuated by the odd, vicious simile (“the tourist masses gathered like thirsty animals at the Mediterranean’s edge”). Even in its equivocal plotting there are suggestions that Osborne is attempting to invert the normal logic of the thriller. Off his game he has still produced an unnerving, allusive, book filled with ideas. A few wobbles then, but Osborne is still up there on the high wire, tip-toeing forward.