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.

Snow Over Surabaya

Biographies & Memoirs

Barley Author, Nigel

Historical

Monsoon Books Pte. Ltd.

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.

The Man who Collected Women

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Rogue Raider is a humorous fictionalized history set in Southeast Asia during the First World War, which centers on a lovable rogue in the form of Captain Julius Lauterbach of the German Imperial Navy and the ship that catapulted the "Flashmanesque" Lauterbach to accidental fame (and infamy), His Imperial Majesty's Emden. Follow the adventures of Lauterbach, a beer-guzzling, cigar-smoking filcher, a braggart and, above all, a survivor.

Rogue Raider

British & Irish

Many men dream of running away to a tropical island and living surrounded by beauty and exotic exuberance. Walter Spies did more than dream. He actually did it. In the 1920s and 30s, Walter Spies — ethnographer, choreographer, film maker, natural historian and painter — transformed the perception of Bali from that of a remote island to become the site for Western fantasies about Paradise and it underwent an influx of foreign visitors. The rich and famous flocked to Spies’ house in Ubud and his life and work forged a link between serious academics and the visionaries from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward, Miguel Covarrubias, Vicki Baum, Barbara Hutton and many others sought to experience the vision Spies offered while Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, the foremost anthropologists of their day, attempted to capture the secret of this tantalizing and enigmatic culture. Island of Demons is a fascinating historical novel, mixing anthropology, the history of ideas and humour. It offers a unique insight into that complex and multi-hued world that was so soon to be swept away, exploring both its ideas and the larger than life characters that inhabited it.

Island of Demons

In 1942 Japanese-occupied Singapore, where violence and starvation stalk the streets, a bizarre tranquillity reigns between warring nations in the Singapore Botanic Gardens. This sensitive and humorous work of historical fiction explores a real, and complicated, chapter of Singapore's history in which British scientists avoided jail during WWII and worked with their Japanese counterparts in the pursuit of science, only to be accused of collaboration following the War.

The Devil's Garden: Love and War in Singapore under the Japanese flag

Literary

In 1985, Dr. Nigel Barley, senior anthropologist at The British Museum, set off for the relatively unknown Indonesian island of Sulawesi in search of the Toraja, a people whose culture includes headhunting, transvestite priests and the massacre of buffalo. In witty and finely crafted prose, Barley offers fascinating insight into the people of Sulawesi and he recounts the tale of the four Torajan woodcarvers he invites back to London to construct an Indonesian rice barn in The British Museum. Previously published as "Not a Hazardous Sport"

Toraja: Misadventures of a Social Anthropologist in Sulawesi, Indonesia

History

Asia

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