Snow Over Surabaya
Snow Over Surabaya

Author: Nigel Barley

Publisher: Monsoon Books

Published: 2017-03-01

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1912049015

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Not many British schoolgirls have grown up to become revolutionary heroes of distant, eastern nations but Muriel Stewart Walker did just that. Under a multitude of different names – ‘K’tut Tantri’ and ‘Surabaya Sue’ being the best know – she joined in the struggle for Indonesian independence after the Second World War and broadcast its revolutionary message to the world on Rebel Radio. But she did more and smuggled arms, and probably drugs, to help finance the new Republic and experienced bloody battle in the British attack on Surabaya that some have seen as a war crime. She went on to become an intimate of the revolutionary leaders and finally lived to see Indonesia take its place amongst the free nations of the world. Glaswegian ‘Surabaya Sue’ is virtually unknown in the West and, even in Indonesia, there have always been doubts about her version of events that many have dismissed outright as a blatant mixture of outrageous fantasy and dishonest omissions. Snow over Surabaya happily embraces those doubts and brings a new, spirited account of her adventures in that tempestuous world.

The Man who Collected Women
The Man who Collected Women

Author: Nigel Barley

Publisher: Monsoon Books

Published: 2020-10-01

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 1912049759

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The eccentric Mr Hare – as he was known to Sophia, the first wife of Singapore founder Thomas Stamford Raffles – and his Asian harem are brought vividly to life in this work of historical fiction set in Southeast Asia. Arthur Grimsby is an ageing expat in 1960s Singapore. Museum curator, ornithologist, freshly bereaved, he fears Singapore’s looming independence and his redundancy and tries to complete one final piece of work: the life story of an eccentric 19th-century Englishman called Alexander Hare. Hare was a trader and slave-owner in the East and a friend of Thomas Stamford Raffles, Lieutenant Governor of Java and the founder of Singapore, but Hare’s chief claim to fame is as the creator of an Asian harem, including in his collection women from Java, Bali, Sumatra, Sulawesi, Borneo, the Malay Peninsula, China, India and Africa. Hare’s love of women and his assembling of a harem, initially in Borneo and then on an uninhabited atoll that would become the Cocos-Keeling Islands, made him an object of guilty male fantasies and of strident female resentments, the epitome of masculine, colonial exploitation. But Arthur Grimsby’s paths are no straighter than Alexander Hare’s and the two grow together as their destinies intertwine.

The Glass Islands
The Glass Islands

Author: Mark Heyward

Publisher: Monsoon Books

Published: 2023-07-01

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1915310172

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When Australian Mark Heyward decides to build a home and raise a family on the island of Lombok, east of Bali, he has little idea of what is to come. Riots and battles, mythical princesses, magical voyages, birth and death, love and loss – the story takes us into the heart of Indonesia, a country where Mark has lived on and off for twenty years, but never on an island like this. The call to prayer echoes in the valleys as the sun drops behind the island. The oceans answer to the tug of the moon, the seasons turn, the rains come and go. Some things never change. The love of a man for his wife, for his children; his desire to build, to create, to leave a mark on this good earth; his struggle to survive, his love of life, his fear of death. This is the heart-warming story of one family's attempt to build a new life in paradise.

Twilight in Kuta
Twilight in Kuta

Author: David Nesbit

Publisher: Monsoon Books

Published: 2018-03-01

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1912049295

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When young western tourist Neil meets Indonesian girl Yossy on Kuta beach and decides to settle permanently in Bali he knows his life is about to change forever … but will it be the paradise he is yearning for? As cracks start to appear in Neil’s halcyon existence, he is forced to re-evaluate all he holds dear. "Twilight in Kuta" explores love, loss and infidelity in present-day Indonesia from a number of perspectives: the bule (Caucasian) English teacher, the duplicitous Indonesian wife, the mixed-race schoolgirl, the Javanese ex-soldier and the naive village girl desperate for love. Their stories intertwine throughout the book, and the various narrators offer different interpretations of the events that unfold. Love and lies in Indonesia …

Chewing Over the West
Chewing Over the West

Author: Doris Jedamski

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 9042027835

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The orientation of academic institutions has in recent years been moving away from highly specialized area studies in the classical sense towards broader regional and comparative studies. Cultural studies points to the limitation of Western approaches to non-Western cultures - a development not yet reflected in actual research and data collections. Bringing together scholars from all over the world with specialized knowledge in both Western and non-Western languages, literatures, and cultures, this collection of essays provides new insights into the agency of non-Western literatures in relation to the West - a term used with critical caution and, like other common binary dualisms, challenged here. Inter-cultural expertise, seldom applied in the combination of Asian, African, and 'oriental' perspectives, makes this compilation of essays an important contribution to the study of colonialism and postcoloniality. Topics covered include postcolonial Arabic writing; T.S. Eliot in contemporary Arabic poetry; Algerian (and Berber) literature; the English language and narratives in Kenyan art; characterization, dialogism, gender and Western infuence in modern Hindi fiction; Naya drama in India; modern Burmese theatre and literature under Western influence; Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and the Vietnamese Novel Without a Name; Western Marxism and vernacular literature in colonial Indonesia; hybridity in Komedi Stambul; and Sherlock Holmes in/and the crime fiction of Siam and Indonesia Contributors: Amina Azza Bekkat; Thomas de Bruijn; Matthew Isaac Cohen; Rasheed El-Enany; Keith Foulcher; Saddik M. Gohar; Rachel Harrison; Doris Jedamski; Ursula Lies; Daniela Merolla; Evan Mwangi; Guzel Vladimirovna Strelkova; Anna Suvorova; U Win Pe

The Interpreter From Java
The Interpreter From Java

Author: Alfred Birney

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-06-04

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 1788544315

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'What a great novel, its language and storytelling so light but also raw and lyrical. A tremendous writer. Read this book' ADRIAAN VAN DIS. Alan Noland discovers his father's memoirs and learns the truth about the violent man he despised. In this unsparing family history, Alan distils his father's life in the Dutch East Indies into one furious utterance. He reads about his work as an interpreter during the war with Japan, his life as an assassin, and his decision to murder Indonesians in the service of the Dutch without any conscience. How he fled to the Netherlands to escape being executed as a traitor and met Alan's mother soon after. As he reads his father's story Alan begins to understand how war transformed his father into the monster he knew. Birney exposes a crucial chapter in Dutch and European history that was deliberately concealed behind the ideological facade of postwar optimism. Readers of this superb novel will find that it reverberates long afterwards in their memory.

Limbo
Limbo

Author: Bernard Wolfe

Publisher: Gateway

Published: 2016-12-15

Total Pages: 534

ISBN-13: 1473212480

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In the aftermath of an atomic war, a new international movement of pacifism has arisen. Multitudes of young men have chosen to curb their aggressive instincts through voluntary amputation - disarmament in its most literal sense. Those who have undergone this procedure are highly esteemed in the new society. But they have a problem - their prosthetics require a rare metal to function, and international tensions are rising over which countries get the right to mine it . . .