In MAN'S LAST SONG, Tam’s first full-length novel the human race faces imminent extinction. The year is 2090. The global population has shrunk to less than half a million; median age about sixty. After forty years of near-universal sterility, humanity is vanishing while the rest of the planet makes a healthy comeback. A few survivors in Hong Kong face the challenge of adjusting to life as post-modern savages, rediscovering instincts that have long been suppressed by civilization. To these post-modern cavemen and cavewomen dwelling in the concrete remains of an empty metropolis, life has become a lonely journey of self-discovery in which they reassess also mankind. Their relationships with nature, each other, and themselves have fundamentally changed. The dilemma, pain and pleasure of love, friendship, compassion, ageing, and loneliness have been heightened by pragmatic dictates. The unknowable - God, Dao, death, even reality - has assumed new and shifting dimensions in man's dying world. How did Homo sapiens reach this dire situation? Looking back with hindsight borrowed from the future, readers may join characters in this book in finding today's world absurd, even suicidal. Others may hang on tenaciously to one thing that has not changed: hope.

The author, JAMES TAM, was born in Hong Kong. He lived and studied in Canada in the 70s and returned to Hong Kong in the mid-80s to work as an environmental engineer and started his own environmental engineering practice. In 2008, he realised his long-term plan to leave business before too late, and sat down to write. As a scientific realist often mistaken for a morbid cynic, he sees abundant evidence that 21st Century Homo sapiens is a delusional and self-endangered species. Nevertheless, he remains irrationally optimistic.

Gillian Bickley