Hstorical Fiction by Jasper Brooke
Set in the last golden age before the modern world changed everything, Jasper Brooke's novels take the reader deep into Edwardian Borneo during an age of adventure, empire, and elegant danger.
The Colonial Intelligence Service Novesl tell the story of three unlikely companions: a former soldier turned intelligence agent, a disinherited English gentleman, and a young boy discovering who he might become, navigate a world of loyalty, secrets, and sacrifice along the east coast of Borneo.
Rich in historical detail and alive with authentic period atmosphere, these are stories that ask a question that has never gone out of fashion: what would you give up to protect the people you love?
Colonial Intelligence Service Novels
In Draft
The Kenyalang
England, 1910. Julian Pembroke, a disinherited officer with no family and no future, sets sail for the unknown with Samuel Whitmore; his former batman, his closest friend, and the man he loves. Their destination is British North Borneo, where a distant uncle has left Julian a rubber plantation and the promise of a new life far from the society that no longer has a place for either of them.
But the journey east brings dangers they did not anticipate. A mysterious symbol appearing on plantation boundaries. A shadowy conspiracy involving land fraud, murder, and men with powerful connections.
The Kenyalang is the story of three lost people who found each other, and what they built together in the most unlikely corner of the world.
Book 1The Chartered Men
Book 3Singapore and Jesselton, 1914
As war breaks out in Europe, its shadow reaches further than anyone in Borneo expects. When CIS recalls Samuel to Singapore as a city stripped of its garrison, its harbour menaced by a German raiders, and its internment camps quietly becoming something more dangerous than anyone will admit; Julian and Ravi are left at Istana Kenyalang to hold what they have built.
Samuel's mission takes him into the networks of wartime Singapore: German prisoners, colonial officials with divided loyalties, and the first threads of a conspiracy that reaches back to a silver framed photograph and four men who have never faced consequences.
Distance tests what the years have built between two men who have learned that secrets kept for love can be as damaging as secrets kept from it.
In Draft
The 7th Earl Pembroke
Book 4The Heart of Borneo
Borneo, 1912. Julian, Samuel and Ravi have built something extraordinary at Istana Kenyalang; a home, a family, and a life that defies everything the world expects of them. But Captain Fairfax, the man they thought safely behind bars, has escaped. And he is coming for them.
Forced to flee into the rivers and rainforests of Sarawak, they must seek the protection of Charles Brooke, the legendary White Rajah, while Samuel is drawn deeper into dangerous intelligence work that threatens everything they have built together. As the jungle closes in, each of them must decide what they are prepared to sacrifice for the others.
The Heart of Borneo is a story of courage, loyalty, and the lengths a family will go to protect itself even when that family is one the world refuses to recognise.
Book 2Sandakan 1915
When Julian's brother Henry is killed on the Western Front, a telegram arrives in Jesselton that changes everything. Julian is now heir to the Pembroke Earldom and his father, the man in the photograph, can no longer pretend his son does not exist.
What follows is a reckoning years in the making: between a father and the son he discarded, between the man Julian was raised to become and the man he has chosen to be, and between an England that demands he return and a life in Borneo that asks him to stay.
Samuel cannot follow him into that world as his equal. Ravi, now a young man with his own claim on the future, refuses to be left behind. The Kenyalang Trust, built to protect what others tried to take, becomes the ground on which the final battle is fought; not with bayonets, but with documents, testimony, and the question of what a man owes to justice when justice requires him to destroy his own family.
In Development
Unwritten