Confessional of a Colonial Rubber Planter in 1950s Malaya
Through a collection of letters written to his best friend and to his father in England, and from his own personal diary entries, John Dodds memoir offers a fascinating, and amusing, glimpse of life as a colonial rubber planter. With true stories and confessions that would make even Somerset Maugham blush.
It is 1950. Singapore and the worst riots the island has ever seen have shut down the town for days, killing 18 people and wounding 173. Racial and religious tension has been simmering for months over the custody battle for wartime waif Maria Hertogh between her Malay Muslim foster mother and her Dutch-Catholic biological parents. Eurasian ......
Juggling her job, her family, her friends and worries about her future is keeping Singapore bookshop assistant Mei busy but when a customer is murdered, she needs to know why. Taking lessons from her favourite detectives, the always inquisitive Mei navigates the darker side of Singapore to find out what really led to the death of Sally Song.
Rainy Day Ramen and the Cosmic Pachinko is told in two distinct, overlapping and interwoven, formats - it describes Fred's drunken, staggering, metaphysical odyssey from Okinawa to Tokyo, and the search for meaning beyond the physical path trodden - and blends Murakami-esque magical realism with a coming-of-age / on-the-road story.
On the Thai island of Koh Samui, Thanikarn, a masseuse with traditional values, has never fallen in love - until she meets Lucas, a dashing French American musician, ten years her junior. After a brief and passionate affair, Lucas returns home and Thanikarn doubts she'll ever see him again
Captain Thomas Bowrey gained renown in numerous fields. He would publish the first ever Malay-English dictionary; he was involved in the African slave trade to India and he collaborated with Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, in the founding of the South Sea Company.
The surreal true story of how a Western teenager came of age in 1960s Bangkok, turned international drug smuggler and walked the prison yards of Thailand’s notorious “Bangkok Hilton”
Julian Lockhardt, the bombastic, heavy-drinking expat manager of the Samarang Hotel - the most prestigious hotel in Vientiane - is short on self-awareness, long on self-pity, and society, so he believes, has failed him. He is easily seduced by Asia's many charms, and deeply resistant to any broader understanding of its underlying values.
Based on historical fact and the author's personal experience, Operation Stealth is the fourth in a series of books involving Gurkha military units in SE Asia that may be read in any order. The author, JP Cross, a much revered retired Gurkha colonel, draws on real characters and events he witnessed across various theatres of war.
