Search results for ""monsoon books""

Jakarta, 2014. Hendra is ‘Radikal’, a techno DJ at the top of his game when a childhood trauma resurfaces. No longer able to find solace in techno and ecstasy, he is presented with a new purpose in life and a focus for his pent-up rage: jihad.

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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.

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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

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A novel about eccentric 19th-century Englishman Alexander Hare: a trader and slave-owner in the East and a friend of Thomas Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, but Hare’s chief claim to fame is as the creator of a harem of women from throughout Asia.

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Alex Marek’s once idyllic life in southern Thailand is being shattered when the reclusive and sometimes violent offshore oil worker John Hunter tells him of his wild scheme to make money, lots of money, by looting an ancient temple hidden deep in the Thai jungle. And he needs a partner.

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Based on historical fact and the author’s personal knowledge, Operation Black Rose is the first in a series of books involving Gurkha military units that may be read in any order and includes Operation Janus, Operation Blind Spot, Operation Stealth and Operation Four Rings.

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After the ceasefire in Laos in February 1973, London forbids Colonel Jason Rance, the British Defence Attaché in Laos, from continuing his search for four Lao ‘moles’, who work within the Communist Party and wear a dedicated ring as a talisman.

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Forgotten in Thailand's troubled Deep South, on the border of Muslim Malaysia, stands a dilapidated wooden palace once home to a Malay ruler, the last of his dynasty.

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Stories of Love, Lust and Loss from Bali. Island Secrets is a collection of stories of lives fraught with scandal, conflict, heartache and despair. A western wife of a Balinese man enjoys a happy marriage and all the trappings of island wealth but the arrival of a man from home throws her life into turmoil as she surrenders to his seduction. A successful middle-aged ad exec leaves his family to become an artist; he lives an enviable life with a beautiful woman half his age but he soon finds himself weary of paradise. A recently divorced woman goes on a solo holiday and is irresistibly drawn to an attractive young man of dubious intentions.

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Millie Lee is 22, smart and ready to start the Singaporean media job of her dreams. She just has to avoid the sexual advances of dirty old men in a newsroom both digitally and emotionally stunted. This is the fictional memoir of a young woman in Singapore trying to make it in a man's media world.

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Life in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is no party … or so we thought. In Saudi Arabia Undercover, expat Harper Walsh busts this myth with true stories of homemade alcohol, pill popping, parties staffed by pretty Ethiopian girls in expat gated compounds, smuggled bacon sandwiches and frequent trips over the border into Bahrain for booze and sex.

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Maya, a thirty-something Indonesian, takes a leap of faith from Jakarta to a job as a waitress aboard a European cruise ship. Set in cruise ship cabins and East London pubs, this tragicomedy is a tale of survival, a search for identity, and the hope of finding a harbour in life's stormy sea.

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Half of Joseph Conrad's body of work is set in late 19th-century Southeast Asia and his favourite destinations were Singapore and the remote ports of the Dutch East Indies. Burnet connects the fictional and real worlds in this fascinating introduction to Conrad's life in the Malay archipelago.

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The eponymous pearl, Martinha Rozells, embodies the rich and diverse heritage of the Straits in the 18th century. Her husband, Captain Light, is the dragon in search of his elusive pearl: a British settlement on the Straits of Malacca. Through their eyes we experience the rich culture of the region and its tumultuous politics.

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As heady as a game of underground poker, and as racy as a night of debauchery in the city, this work of pulp-fiction packs pedal-to-the-floor action from start to finish.

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Pete wanders into a Bangkok bar and meets the love of his life. Joy is the girl of his dreams. What follows is a roller-coaster ride of sex, drugs, lies and deception, as Pete discovers that his very own private dancer is not all that she claims to be. And that far from being the girl of his dreams, Joy is his own personal nightmare.

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The story of what would become the tipping point of the Malayan Emergency in favour of the security forces is retold against a background of events in Moscow, Darjeeling, Delhi and Calcutta, where senior communist party members plot to infiltrate Gurkha units and destabilise Malaya.

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Philip Goundry is 93, living out his days quietly when a young researcher arrives, wanting to learn more about his former life in Malaya. His memory growing fitful, Philip is torn between wanting to unburden himself and staying silent about the sinister events of his childhood on a Malayan rubber plantation.

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A side effect of Vietnam's stratospheric economic growth has been a burgeoning erotic industry catering to locals and tourists. Author Ewe Paik Leong explores the underbelly of Saigon with side trips to Osaka in Japan and Phuket in Thailand before returning to his hometown of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.

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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.

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Cold-blooded bargirls, naive tourists and sordid scams - it was all in a night's work for Pattaya bar manager Simon Los.

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In George Town, the capital of Penang, the Pearl of the Orient and a Malaysian island hugely popular with domestic and international tourists, trishaws ply between colonial buildings as they ferry tourists to sightsee. The more lustful combine sightseeing with sex, sometimes with unexpected results.

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Tracing the development of Singapore in the years 1836-1854, against the background of the First Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion, Chasing the Dragon (Singapore Saga, Vol. 2) continues to vividly portray the lives of the early pioneers of the expanding port city.

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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.

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In the 14th and 15th centuries, the Majapahit kingdom reigned supreme in eastern Java, and its influence stretched far and wide, throughout present-day Indonesia, parts of the Malay peninsula and the island of Tumasek, now Singapore.

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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.

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At the end of the Malayan Emergency Jason Rance visits the orang asli hill tribes in Malaya and only the skill of a Gurkha saves him from being killed by four poisoned blowpipe darts.

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In this intimate collection of autobiographical essays that every woman should read, Swi offers stories of deep reflection that relate to the tears and laughter, the rise and fall, and the love and pain felt by women in Malaysia and Singapore over the last 75 years.

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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.

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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.

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