Welcome to the World of Jasper Brooke

There is a part of the world that history has not yet finished with.

The great arc of territories that sweeps from the Malacca Straits through the islands and rivers of the Malay Archipelago, Penang, Singapore, Sarawak, Brunei, British North Borneo was, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one of the most extraordinary places on earth. A crossroads of empires and trade routes, 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, always in ways that the history books have barely begun to capture.

This is where Jasper Brooke sets his stories.

Not because it is exotic (though it is) but because it is true. 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. 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 France.

Every book Jasper Brooke writes begins here. In the heat and the river light. In the last golden age before everything changed.