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After years of jungle service, Jason Rance, a maverick British major of Gurkhas has one final chance of qualifying for promotion to lieutenant colonel. During a covert operation on the Thai-Malayan border, Rance meets a Chinese schoolboy friend from jungle-operation days and together they must pit Malaya's orang asli, or indigenous people, against Chin Peng and the Malayan Communists, now hiding in south Thailand, trying to rescue two stranded wartime Gurkhas as they do.

Ten-year-old Singaporean Maya is lonely: her grandmother is dead, her mother is focused on her career and her best friend has become a bully. When Aunty M, a domestic worker from Indonesia, joins the family to take care of Maya and her baby sister, Maya is ready to hate her. However, after Aunty M rescues a fellow maid living in the same building, Maya discovers a side of Singapore hitherto unknown to her.

Iban Woman is the third in the Iban Dream series of standalone novels by Golda Mowe, the most prolific Iban novelist in English of her generation and a descendant of the erstwhile headhunters of Borneo. In this her latest book, readers are once again immersed in Iban culture, learning the art of the weave, how to interpret omens in nature and how to hunt for animals ... and human heads.

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.

Weakened by hunger, thirst and ill-treatment, author Charles McCormac, then a WWII POW in Japanese-occupied Singapore, knew that if he did not escape he would die. With sixteen others he broke out of Pasir Panjang camp and began an epic two-thousand-mile, five-month escape from the island of Singapore, through the jungles of Indonesia to Australia.

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.

In 1938 Malaya, Japanese intelligence officers and pro-Independence Indians conspire to test their suspicions about British intelligence officer Philip Rance by attempting to burgle his office. The plot is foiled by Rance's teenage son, Jason, who must move to England to escape revenge. 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.

In this eruditely crafted and humorous memoir, Awang Goneng (pen name of writer Wan A. Hulaimi) evokes the pleasures of a kampung childhood in Trengganu, Malaysia. Sultans, sweetmeat sellers, and shopkeepers all act as springboards as you meander through Trengganu history, and by the end of this book you will have painlessly mastered the Trengganuspeak that foils even fellow Malaysians."

Contradictory, bewildering, revolutionary and hypocritical, this is a collection of articles on the complex and fascinating world of sex in Asia.

Juggling her bookstore job, her family, her friends and worries about her future is keeping Singaporean Mei busy but when a customer is murdered, Mei needs to know why. Taking lessons from her favourite detectives, the always inquisitive bookseller navigates the darker side...

Before Raffles, before Rajah Brooke, there was Francis Light, the 18th-century trailblazer in the Malay Archipelago. 'Dragon', the first volume of the Penang Chronicles, charts Light‿s colourful adventures in the decades before the settlement of Penang island, the Company‿s first possession in the East Indies.

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

Unemployed, broke and engaged in a telepathic turf war with a feral cat behind an Okinawa convenience store, 28-year-old Fred Buchanan is hopelessly lost in life. After a fortuitous bet on the island bullfights, he boards a ferry to Kobe then a slow train to Tokyo, chasing shadows of a halogen dream. Rainy Day Ramen and the Cosmic Pachinko is told in two distinct overlapping and interwoven formats. Join Fred's drunken, staggering, metaphysical odyssey from Okinawa to Tokyo, and his search for meaning beyond the physical path trodden. The novel blends Murakami-esque magical realism with a coming-of-age on-the-road story.

Arthur Grimsby is an ageing museum curator in 1960s Singapore. He fears Singapore's looming independence and his redundancy and tries to complete one final piece of work: the life story of an real-life eccentric 19th-century Englishman called Alexander Hare. Hare was a slave-owner, the epitome of masculine, colonial exploitation, and the creator of an Asian harem initially in Borneo and then on an uninhabited atoll that would become the Cocos-Keeling Islands.

In post-WWII Laos, Vietnamese communists secretly commence to infiltrate the kingdom. They are countered by four dedicated Lao 'moles' who try to thwart these aims. Gurkha Colonel Jason Rance is unwittingly dragged into a confrontation between one of the Lao moles and a Thai spy and the mole gives him a ring as a reward for saving his life. During his appointment in Laos as military attaché, Rance becomes a target of the KGB and of the Vietnamese communists, and is sought by the remaining three Lao moles because of the ring in his possession.

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. After a brief and passionate affair, Lucas returns home and Thanikarn doubts she'll ever see him again. Will Thanikarn find out what has become of Lucas? Will their lives ever cross again? Only unforeseen events and the gift of a song will decide.

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.

In 1943 on Bougainville Island, New Guinea, a Japanese officer beheads Hugh Rand, an Australian spy -- a coast watcher. But Rand's influence transcends his death. For decades he plagues characters who strive to cope with him and one another in New Guinea, the Gilbert Islands, Australia and Japan. 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.

Cold-blooded Thai bargirls, naïve tourists and sordid scams - it was all in a night's work for Pattaya bar manager Simon Los. For years, expat Simon Los worked the bars of Pattaya. Befriending Thai staff as well as western and local customers, he was privy to the dating despair - and occasional joy - of countless couples. That bargirls would go to such lengths to deceive their farang boyfriends, out of poverty or greed, was not unexpected, but Simon was also surprised to see some of his customers find true love in the Land of Smiles.

The eccentric saints of Java's impact both on challenging fundamentalist aspects of Islam and shaping the dynamic of modern Indonesia is considered in this illustrated and map-bearing investigation.

Set against the expansion of Singapore in the years 1834-1854, Chasing the Dragon (Singapore Saga, Vol. 2) continues to vividly portray the lives of the early pioneers of the expanding port city, including Joseph Balestier, Seah Eu Chin, Captain Henry Keppel, Tan Tock Seng, Munshi Abdullah, Governor Butterworth and Whampoa as well as fictional characters who bring nineteenth-century Singapore to life.