Around the novels I have built a wider world: the world I wish was still accessible to us all.
The Brooke Papers is my cabinet of curiosities where I share short, illustrated notes on the real objects, places, customs and forgotten people of the period. These are drawn mainly from my own collection of antiquities and which adorn the shelves and cases of my study and around my family home of Brooke Manor.
My Micro Essays are the shorter pieces of academic thought that sit alongside the fiction. They are the brief explorations of themes, histories and human textures that the novels can only touch on in passing. Some are about the wider world of the period: the strange social architecture of a colonial port town, the etymologies and folklore that survive on the edge of an empire, the small forgotten cruelties and small forgotten kindnesses of a vanished society. Others reach a little further: into my own years as an educator, into the things research has taught me, into the questions a historical novelist learns to live with. They are short by design. Not all of history needs a long book filled with quotations.
Through my short stories and novellas I offer the smaller corners of the same world: a single encounter, a single afternoon, a single object whose story refused to fit inside a novel. And the characters themselves have a home here, where you can meet the people who walk through the books before, between, or after you read them.
Every book I write begins in the world I have created. The stories are set in the humid heat, in the river light and in the last golden age before everything changed.
Historical Adventure Fiction Set in Edwardian Borneo
Sea voyages, conspiracy, empire, and inheritance. Stories from the fading world of the Edwardian Malay Archipelago.
A Vanishing World at the Edge of Empire: There is a part of the world that history has not yet finished with…
The novels are the heart of what I do. They follow a cast of characters, which I share through this website under the title The Kenyalang Series where the characters themselves have a home and where you can meet the people who walk through the books before, between, or after you read them.
These are the district officers and planters, mission wives and merchants' clerks, longhouse chiefs and Chinese trading families that inhabit the small towns and great rivers of the Malay Edwardian world. They are stories about belonging and unbelonging, about the lives lived sideways to the official record, and about a country at the moment just before it all disappeared.
The Kenyalang Series is set in the great arc of territories that sweeps from the Malacca Straits through to the islands and rivers of the Malay Archipelago of Penang, Singapore, Sarawak, Brunei and British North Borneo. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this area was one of the most extraordinary places on earth.
By the 1900s the area was a crossroads of empires and trade routes. It was made up of ancient kingdoms and colonial ambition, of rainforests older than recorded history and cities building themselves from nothing in a generation.
A world where Chinese merchants, Iban warriors, British administrators, Tamil labourers, Malay sultans and Dayak longhouse communities lived in improbable proximity. Sometimes in conflict, sometimes in something approaching harmony but in ways that the history books have barely begun to capture.
Not because it is exotic (though it is), but because there are stories to be told. In my works, the details are real. The history is real. The people who inhabited this vanishing world were as complicated, as courageous, and as flawed as any characters fiction could invent. I feel that they deserve to be written about with honesty, with care, and with the conviction that their world was as worthy of great storytelling as any drawing room in London or battlefield in Europe.
