Apricot Marmalade and the Edmondson Transmittal is exactly the kind of book that gets overlooked because it’s impossible to pitch in a sentence and absolutely worth your time. It’s a Vietnam-era satire set in Bangkok, drawn from the author’s actual service in Military Intelligence, and it reads like Catch-22 got sent to Southeast Asia.
Orey writes with the authority of someone who watched this absurdity unfold in real time. The characters are magnificently, specifically incompetent — not cartoon buffoons, but recognizable institutional types that anyone who’s ever worked in a bureaucracy will know immediately.
The prose is clean, the comedy is precise, the Thailand setting is genuinely immersive. This is indie publishing at its best: a book the major houses would have asked him to simplify. Don’t simplify it. It’s perfect.
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