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Those in thrall to the steamy Thai capital will warm to “Bangkok Days.” The memoir’s nomadic British author, who first visited the city for its cheap dentistry, and later returned as “a man on the lam who had no objective in his day-to-day life but an inquisitive loitering,” has penned a bittersweet study of a metropolis that attracts more than its fair share of lost souls. Bangkok, Lawrence Osborne says, is “where some people go when they feel that they can no longer be loved.”

The human strays that Osborne writes about are not Thai. They are the legion of middle-aged and older men from the West who, the author believes, are attracted by Bangkok’s “culture of complete physicality … precisely because they can never understand it.” Some are adrift and perhaps disappointed in life, others are lonely and possibly broken, and all are hoping for personal reinvention amid Bangkok’s heady mix of ancient Buddhist mores, sexual tolerance and go-getting modern ways.

The Thai city, Osborne suggests, is an existential refuge for the planet’s doomed and damned.

The loose-knit roll call of outcasts populating “Bangkok Days” is what makes Osborne’s sixth book such a gratifying read. Most notable is lascivious McGinnis, a tall, willowy and “dashingly sinister” English aristocrat with a face “like that of a pleasant hoodlum who has just shot down a kite.” McGinnis’s bar-crawling partner in crime, Lionel, was once a high-flying journalist now resigned to reviewing spas for European travel magazines. McGinnis describes Lionel as “a wonderful pervert. He’s French.”

Farlo, meanwhile, is a gutter-mouthed Scot who prowls tourist haunts, stalking customers for his hunting lodge in mine-riddled rural Cambodia. Farlo only snags a couple of punters each year, and he takes them out shooting deer with former Khmer Rouge. Retired Australian bank manager Dennis is secretive about his former life. His wife has passed away, and now he has a penchant for watercolor painting and Viagra. He is “a man who scanned your sentences as if he was reading them on a moving ticker tape, like financial data.”

Each is pathetic but likeable in his own way, and all are “not so much swimming their way through life as drowning with a show of bravado.” A more bizarre fraternity of characters could not be found even in JG Ballard’s most surreal imaginings, and, though Osborne insists all are real people with their names changed for the sake of privacy, “Bangkok Days” frequently reads more like fiction than reportage, the author more of a romantic raconteur than a strict documentarian.

The unusual and tragicomic scenarios that members of Osborne’s cast occasionally find themselves in bolster the dreamlike atmosphere of “Bangkok Days” and the writer — unlike so many others with less restraint — mercifully plays down the sleaze for which the Thai capital is notorious.

During a bout of sickness and a hospital stay, Osborne and a German patient wander off to a go-go bar with their IV drips in tow. Dining at the No Hands Restaurant, where waitresses hand-feed Western customers like oversized pink babies, is recalled with faint relish. Toward the book’s close, Osborne follows a kathoey (transsexual) to the murky Chao Phraya River, where she releases a catfish in order to gain karmic merit. The parallel with the Western male seeking rebirth in this most unfathomable of destinations is clear.

And all the while Osborne’s recollections are flush with obvious affection for his beloved Bangkok and its easygoing habits, the writer no doubt agreeing with Somerset Maugham’s observation that we should be grateful that “something so fantastical exists.” When asked if he is happy with his new life as a retiree in the city, wary widower Dennis cites his regular paid-for couplings with beautiful young Thai student Porntip, and he confesses, “It’s pleasure, not happiness, but I am happy with that.”

Bangkok Days
By Lawrence Osborne
Published by Harvill Secker
288 pages