Novella & Short Stories
Some stories live between the chapters of a novel; in the years before, the moments unseen, the voices that never quite had room to speak. The Jasper Brooke novellas and short stories are those voic es. Each one is a companion piece to the main series, offering a window into a character's inner world that the novels, by their nature, could only glimpse. They do not replace the novels. They deepen them. Read alone they stand as short stories in their own right. Read alongside the series they illuminate everything.
Short Stories to Accompany The Kenyalang Series
Mafeking, May 1900. A fever tent. A batman and his officer, and three weeks of Great Expectations read aloud by lamplight. This is where it begins.
In Every Prospect tells the story of Captain Julian Pembroke and Sergeant Samuel Whitmore across twelve years and four places. Mafeking, Pretoria, the Northern Cape veldt, and the veranda of a house in British North Borneo where two men drink their morning coffee and a writing slope sits on the table between them with something inside it that has been there for eleven years.
A private journal kept in secret. Twelve letters written to a man who was never meant to read them. A note left on a writing slope before first light. A love conducted entirely in paper and silence, in the only language available to two men for whom no other language was permitted.
The letters are addressed to HP. Herbert Pocket. A cipher begun in a fever tent and carried across two continents and a decade. To any hostile reader they are addressed to no one. To Samuel Whitmore they would have been immediately legible.
He never read them. Not for eleven years.
Note: This Novella incorporates The Rain Before England as one chapter.
Jesselton, August 1920. Ravi Whitmore-Pembroke sits in the dark holding his newborn son against his chest and tries to decide what to tell him about where he came from.
This is that story. Aden, 1898 to 1910. A Tamil mother who was brave and smelled of coconut oil. A British officer who left and never looked back. Five years on the streets of a harbour town that belonged to everyone and no one. And one morning in December when two Englishmen came around a corner at exactly the right moment.
Some stories begin before the beginning. This is one of them.
Cairo, August 1897. Dr. Evelyn Blackwood walks out of a hospital tent in the early morning with her hands steady and her face correct and fifteen years of love folded in her jacket pocket.
This is that story. Cambridge, 1882 to Cairo, 1897. A November library and a woman translating. A shared tent on the desert plateau at Saqqara where someone had once placed a three thousand year old secret in the sand and waited for the right person to find it. Fifteen years of expeditions and field tables and a decanter of sherry outside a college room and a Burgundy at Rules and a kiss in Paris above a bookshop on the Rue des Saints-Pères.
And one morning in a hospital tent when Evelyn learned that there is no public language for the loss of the person who was the fixed point of every day. Some loves are never recorded. Only carried.
Age Notice
A note before you read on: certain novellas in this collection carry mature themes and explicit content to show the close relationship between characters. These titles are intended for readers aged 18 and older.
Novellas to Accompany The Kenyalang Series
South Africa, 1st July 1902. The war is over. The resignation is accepted. Captain Julian Pembroke and Sergeant Samuel Whitmore ride out of camp at first light and do not look back.
This is the story of the journey from the highveld to Cape Town, through the Hex River mountains in the rain. An abandoned Boer farm forge on the road south. A fire lit against the storm. A Stellenbosch red poured into tin cups by a man who planned the last meal in Africa two weeks before it happened, because that is the kind of man he is.
The ledger is opened for the first time. The horses are sold and entered into the accounts. The gangplank divides them; officer accommodation to the right, other ranks to the left and by afternoon they are on the same ship going to the same place and as far apart as two men can be on one vessel.
Some arrangements are covers. Some are the only honest thing available. This is the night before England. The last night Africa kept for them
Tenom, British North Borneo, 1st August 1914. Beyond Beaufort follows four travellers on the North Borneo Railway on the day that it became a true company and uniting the interior villages and the coastal roads.
Ravi Whitmore-Pembroke returns from the interior with a young orphan boy called Ah Kow. Following a fact finding mission he is planning to grow coffee beneath the shade of the rubber trees on the family estate. Dr Evelyn Blackwood arrives by steamer from Brunei with news, instructions, and the possibility of making a permanent home in Jesselton. At Beaufort Junction, Julian Pembroke waits beside the line with the news that the land deal has gone through and the deed to his new estate is safe in his case.
Together this makeshift family head home towards Jesselton on the train which is to be the inaugural trip of the new line.
A railway junction in the tropics. Coffee stalls on station platforms. A decorated locomotive carrying passengers north along the coast. A young boy seeing the sea for the first time. A station halt that becomes something larger than a pause in the journey. And a bright afternoon on the railway when several lives quietly begin to change direction.
With an afternoon to spare and watercolours in his case, Julain and Ah Kow set off to capture the pause on paper.
For one journey through the summer of 1914, all roads lead toward the sea.
The Towkay's Boy follows the seven years of an apprenticeship struck at a temple festival between two men who barely knew each other, and everything neither of them put into the contract.
Yap Cheng Guan arrives in Kuching at fifteen, sent down from the Bau goldfields with a letter from his father and nothing else. Towkay Chua Boon Hock takes him on for seven years, agreeing to feed him, house him, and teach him pepper, gambier, and the trade of a shophouse.
By the boy's twenty-second birthday, what began as an apprenticeship has become something the letter from Bau never asked for, and something neither towkay nor boy has found the words to name.
A shophouse counter with the tide turning across the road. A ledger kept in one hand, then two. A jar of tuak shared on the floor after the Gawai trade. a bout of fever that nearly kills the apprentice. A chhiam stick drawn at New Year and never read aloud. A journey upriver to release a promise made at a festival seven years before. And a sign repainted in gold above a door that once carried only one name.
With the shop shuttered for the night and the ledger closed, two names now sit on its cover where for fifteen years there was only ever one.
For seven years above a shop in the Main Bazaar, the debt runs both ways.