American schoolchildren are taught that the night in 1775 when the famous patriot Paul Revere waited for the signal to inform him whether the invading British were coming by land or by sea, he was told to watch for a lantern that would be hung in the steeple of Boston’s [...]
Our Home in Myanmar: Four Years in Yangon is a delightful read, both an accessible introduction to Myanmar and a candid behind-the-scenes look at journalism in a developing country. The “our” in the title refers to the author, Jessica Mudditt, a young Australian, and Sherpa, her Bangladeshi husband, whom she met [...]
The striking originality of this novel starts with the sub-title. What to make of the declaration (warning?) that this is an “anti-travel novel”? The story takes us on a roll call of Asian travel destinations – Bangkok, Vientiane, Shanghai , Hanoi, Phnom Penh, Hong Kong, Manila, Jakarta, Bali, Seoul, Mumbai , Kolkata, [...]
The ruins of Angkor are Southeast Asia’s most spectacular historical attraction. Still awe-inspiring despite the tourist hordes, they have inspired surprisingly few novels. Angkor is the main setting for Samuel Ferrer’s The Last Gods of Indochine, a historical drama combining two storylines separated by six centuries; one story is set [...]
Any expat in Asia grumbling about the stifling summer heat, oversized bugs, or the difficulty of tracking down decent cream cheese, would do well to read Rosie Milne’s superb Olivia & Sophia. Although at its heart a love story describing the marriages between British colonial official Sir Thomas Stanford Raffles [...]
Borneo. Few place names are more evocative of old-style adventure. Steamy jungles, headhunting Dayaks, exotic wildlife, and scantily clad native women – the stuff that schoolboy dreams are made of. And the most romantic of all was Sarawak, in northwestern Borneo, a kingdom ruled by a dynastic monarchy of Englishmen [...]