Search results for ""Monsoon Books""

Echoes of footsteps in the hallways make Anna wonder whether rumours of the house being haunted are true. A place with a dark history. Anna bumps into Salimah, and their lives intertwine in unexpected ways. Tensions rise as the house’s haunting presence grips both women and threatens to upset an already fragile friendship.

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In 1943 New Guinea, a Japanese officer beheads Hugh Rand, an Australian spy—a coast watcher. The layers unfold as the author entices us through cultural, historical and intellectual curtains, deep into minds and relationships disturbed by the Pacific war and Rand’s legacy in New Guinea, Gilbert Islands, Japan and Australia.

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Colonial Singapore. A love triangle. Will one woman’s jealousy destroy everyone? Mei Mei and an English boy, Richard, fall in love. However, British-born Clementine has set her heart on marrying Richard and the social divide between coloniser and native keep the lovers apart.

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In this ecological parable, author John Waromi, a member of the Ambai tribe, sheds light on not only the ecology of the southern Papuan coast but also the struggle of the indigenous Papuan people to survive the environmental destruction that is inflicted upon them.

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Hungry Ghosts is the volume three in the Singapore Saga, a series of historical fiction covering the early years of Singapore, and follows Forbidden Hill and Chasing the Dragon.

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Skinny Chinese taxi-girls dance with off-duty British military personnel at the Yam Yam nightclub to the strains of 'Rose, Rose, I love you' and 'Terang Bulan'. Attractively dressed in their long, tight-fitting, slit-sided cheongsams, the girls also listen out for loose talk, which they feed back to their Communist handlers. It is 1950s Malaya and the country is in the throes of the Malayan Emergency. As the British do battle with Communist terrorists hiding deep in the jungle, one British officer, a Communist sympathizer, has come to the attention of the staff at the Yam Yam. When Alan Hinlea, a British Gurkha captain with a hatred of a class system that has always kept him down, deserts to the guerillas and is spirited away to the jungle Communist HQ, Chin Peng, the leader of the Malayan Communist Party gloats at what he hopes will be a major propaganda victory. A fellow British Gurkha officer is despatched with five Gurkhas to hunt Hinlea down and the chase through pathless jungle becomes a race against time and a contest of deadly jungle warfare skills. Operation Janus is the first in a trilogy of books involving Gurkha military units that may be read in any order and is followed by Operation Blind Spot and Operation Four Rings. The author, JP Cross, a retired Gurkha colonel, old 'jungle hand' and counter-insurgency expert, draws on real events he witnessed during his time fighting in the Malayan Emergency and on true characters, including a British officer of his own battalion who attempted to join the Communist terrorists.

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Nona Baker stayed behind in the Malayan jungle during WWII and was adopted by Chinese guerrillas. Against all odds, this remarkable, brave young woman, known as Pai Naa (White Nona), remained in the jungle for three years, avoiding capture by the Japanese and betrayal by spies.

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'The Man Who Wore His Wife’s Sarong', Suchen Christine Lim’s short stories of the unsung, unsaid and uncelebrated in Singapore, delve beneath the sunlit island’s prosperity and coded decorum. Her characters chip away prejudice and sculpt it into acceptance of the other.

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Klong Prem prison, Thailand. The “Bangkok Hilton”, where 600 foreigners among the 12,000 inmates of this walled prison city also wait and rot. Among the tragic, ruthless and forgotten, one man resolves to do what no other has done: escape. This is the true story of drug smuggler David McMillan’s perilous break-out from Asia’s most notorious prison.

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In Volume 3 of Penang Chronicles, as the 18th century draws to a close, Penang must fortify and prepare for war, and Francis Light’s partner, Martinha Rozells, learns to negotiate the murky waters of colonial prejudice and corruption for the sake of her family.

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Cigarette Girl is more than a love story and the soul-searching journey of three brothers. Set on the island of Java, the story follows the evolution of a family's kretek, or clove cigarette, business, introducing readers to three generations of Indonesia's history through cloves and unrequited love.

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Charlie Chaplin is on vacation in Asia in 1936 when Cambodians are challenging colonial exploitation. Chaplin must choose: lend his celebrity status to the anti-colonial cause or stay silent. Fictionalised around real events, this is a story about how an embittered Chaplin abandons his silent Tramp in order to find his own voice.

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Juggling her job, her family, her friends, and worries about her future, keeps the inquisitive – some would say kaypoh – bookshop assistant Mei busy, but when a customer is murdered, she needs to know why. Taking lessons from her favourite mysteries, Mei navigates the darker side of Singapore to find out what really led to the death of Sally Song.

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Following the assassination of a British Colonel in a guerrilla ambush by communist terrorists during the Malayan Emergency in 1954, Jason Rance, an English company commander in a Gurkha battalion and jungle expert, is tasked with tracking down the bandits.

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Join Maryam and Rubiah in their sixth adventure assisting the Kota Bharu Police Department, or vice versa, in Western Chant, the latest in the award-winning Kain Songket Mysteries series.

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In this heartfelt memoir, spanning the 1950s and ’60s, Major Margaret Thomas ARRC rises through the ranks of the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps (the QAs), the nursing branch of the British Army, healing injured soldiers far from home as well as educating and recruiting sisters back in Britain.

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Bandit Saints of Java is a work of nonfiction that delves deep under the surface of modern Indonesia, exploring personalities and stories in the wacky world of local pilgrimage. It paints an astonishing portrait of Islam as it is practised today - largely invisible to journalists, scholars and tourists - by many of the 130 million people of Java.

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Historical military novel set in Malaysia and Thailand in the 1950s and centred on the British Gurkha regiments that fought in the Malayan Emergency and the Indonesian Confrontation. Standalone sequel to Operation Janus.

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Circumstance is the first in a trilogy of W. Somerset Maugham-inspired colonial tales set in 1920s Malaya.

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Twilight in Kuta explores love, loss and infidelity in present-day Indonesia from a number of perspectives, their stories intertwine throughout the book, and the various narrators offer different interpretations of the events that unfold.

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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 Annie Collins, following the Maria Hertogh case and filled with hope, returns to Singapore seeking her own lost baby Maria. As the time bomb ticks and Annie unravels the threads of her quest into increasingly dangerous territory, she finds strange recollections intruding...

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Thomas Hodges of the East India Company seizes a chance at glory by being the first to venture ashore at the pepper port of Banten in Java, Indonesia, in 1608. Would he unlock the mysterious riches of Java for the English, or die forgotten with a Javanese kris or Portuguese poignard between his ribs?

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Operation Hunter is the ninth in a series of books involving Gurkha military units that may be read in any order. The author, JP Cross, a retired Gurkha colonel, old jungle hand' and counter-insurgency expert, draws on real events he witnessed during his time fighting in the Malayan Emergency.

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