# The Ballad of a Small Player

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![The Ballad of a Small Player](https://quivercdn.com/covers/vintage-digital/lawrence-osborne/the-ballad-of-a-small-player_978-14-4818-971-7-340705e5.webp?v=2026-10-07%2003%3A07%3A50)

- Book: [The Ballad of a Small Player](https://www.bookquiver.com/lawrence-osborne/the-ballad-of-a-small-player) ([The Ballad of a Small Player.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/lawrence-osborne/the-ballad-of-a-small-player.md))
- Authors: [Lawrence Osborne](https://www.bookquiver.com/lawrence-osborne)
- Publisher: vintage_digital
- Medium: ebook
- ISBN: 978-14-4818-971-7
- Published: 2014-04-03
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: E-book

## Description

SOON TO BE A MAJOR NETFLIX FILM, STARRING COLIN FARELL AND TILDA SWINTON ‘I waited patiently for the next hand to be played out, and I had a feeling it was going to be a Natural, a perfect nine.’ His name is Lord Doyle. His plan: to gamble away his last days in the dark and decadent casino halls of Macau. His game: baccarat punto blanco -- 'that slutty dirty queen of casino card games.' Though Doyle is not a Lord at all. He is a fake; a corrupt lawyer who has spent a career siphoning money from rich clients. And now he is on the run, determined to send the money – and himself – up in smoke. So begins a beguiling, elliptical velvet rope of a plot: a sharp suit, yellow kid gloves, another naughty lemonade and an endless loop of small wins and losses. When Lady Luck arrives in the form of Dao-Ming, a beautiful yet enigmatic lost soul, so begins a spectacular and unnatural winning streak in which millions come Doyle’s way. But in these shadowy dens of risk and compulsion, in a land governed by superstition, Doyle knows that when the bets are high, the stakes are even greater. The Ballad of a Small Player is a sleek, dark-hearted masterpiece: a ghost story set in the land of the living, and a decadent morality tale of a Faustian pact made, not with the devil, but with fortune’s fickle hand.