The Kenyalang Series
The Kenyalang Series is a sequence of historical novels set across the British Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. The books follow Captain Julian Pembroke and Sergeant Samuel Whitmore (an officer and his batman) from the country houses of Edwardian England, to the jungles of British North Borneo & Sarawak, where they eventually make their home at Istana Kenyalang. The series takes its name from the great hornbill of Borneo, the kenyalang, whose carved likeness watches over the house they build together.
The novels are about love, loyalty, and the small private kingdoms men have always made for themselves in the corners of vanished empires. They are also about the cost of such kingdoms; what is given up, what is hidden, what is carried across continents to be kept in a cabinet of curiosities. The series draws on seventeen years of the author's own life in Borneo. The books the world inhabits is built from real ships, real regiments, real routes, and a careful refusal to invent what the historical record already provides.d with intention, from the atmosphere we create to the way each session flows.
The Kenyalang
A journey to the East, 1910.
Julian Pembroke, a disinherited ex 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 1
The 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 2
Final Draft
The Chartered Men
Book 3
As war breaks out in Europe in 1914, its shadow reaches further than anyone in Borneo expects. When the 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 on to what they have built and secure a future for them all.
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 4
When Julian's brother Henry is killed on the Western Front in 1915, 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