Some people are born into the wrong century. Jasper Brooke is one of them.

Not because the present world holds no appeal. He is the first to acknowledge its wonders; but because something was lost when the modern age arrived, and he has never quite stopped noticing the absence. The elegance. The standards. The unhurried quality of a life lived at the pace of ships rather than aeroplanes, of telegrams rather than instant messages. The magic of a world still large enough to contain genuine mystery.

The Edwardian period has always fascinated him. Not through rose-tinted glass, but with clear eyes. It was the last golden age before everything changed. Before two world wars dismantled the certainties of the nineteenth century and replaced them with the relentless pace of the modern world. The clothes were finer. The conversation was slower. People dressed for dinner and meant it. Standards existed not as affectation but as a genuine expression of how life ought to be conducted.

Jasper has lived in Sarawak, in the heart of Borneo, and understands firsthand that some places carry a different relationship with time. That knowledge sits at the centre of everything he writes.

It also shapes how he approaches the question of empire (a subject that demands honesty). The colonial period is rightly under scrutiny, and Jasper has no interest in romanticising its darker chapters. But Borneo was not India or Africa. The White Rajahs of Sarawak operated outside the machinery of the British Empire and the Chartered Company in North Borneo was constantly at odds with Whitehall. The relationship between the colonialists and the indigenous peoples of Borneo, such as the Iban and the Dayak, the communities of the great rivers and primary rainforest, was something considerably more nuanced than simple domination. It was a world where a European might genuinely learn from those around him, where adaptation mattered more than imposition, and where the jungle had its own authority that no empire could override. That complexity is what drew him to write about it, and what he hopes his readers will find there.

This was also the beginning of the end. By the end of the Edwardian Period, the great colonial project was already carrying the seeds of its own dissolution, though few could see it yet. The wars that followed would change everything. Accelerating technology, dismantling empire, and stripping away, along with much that deserved to go, something that perhaps did not. The spark, as Jasper thinks of it. The particular quality of a life lived with ceremony and intention.

Jasper inhabits this world as naturally off the page as on it. He wears a three piece suit every day. Not for occasion, but simply because it is Tuesday, and Tuesday deserves the same standards as Saturday. At weekends he dresses down, which is to say he wears a cravat. He drinks tea from a china cup and saucer. He keeps an ebony walking cane for perambulating the parks and gardens of London and Paris, cities he moves through at a pace the modern world has largely abandoned. These are not affectations. They are the outward expression of an inward conviction — that how we present ourselves to the world is a form of respect, both for others and for ourselves.

If he could step back in time to 1912 Borneo, he would do so without hesitation. And if you asked him which of his characters he would choose to be, he would answer without pausing: Samuel. The man who was one thing, became another, found his people against all probability, and made a life of quiet purpose and absolute loyalty in the most unlikely corner of the world.

That, in the end, is what these books are about.

The Kenyalang and The Heart of Borneo are his first two novels. They are set in 1910 and 1912 respectivley. This was the last golden age before the world changed forever. The books are written with the conviction that what was lost then is still worth finding, and that the people who lived through that vanishing moment were considerably more complicated, and more interesting, than history has generally given them credit for.