Mapped
The Garden of Evening Mists
Tan Twan Eng
The Cameron Highlands are Malaysia's cool tea country, a hill station of mist, jungle and terraced estates high in Pahang. A survivor of a wartime Japanese camp comes here to build a garden for her dead sister and instead apprentices to a Japanese gardener, while the Malayan Emergency simmers in the surrounding forest. The map runs from the town of Tanah Rata out across the tea slopes to the mossy summit forest, with the frame narrator's Kuala Lumpur far below.
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The Gift of Rain
Tan Twan Eng
On the island of Penang, the half-English, half-Chinese Philip Hutton is taken as a pupil by the Japanese diplomat Endo-san, who teaches him aiki-jutsu and a hard code of duty, only for the bond to be tested to breaking when Japan invades Malaya in 1941. Tan maps his home island: the Hutton family's George Town mansion and the colonial society of the port, the small island off the coast where Endo-san lives and teaches, the town under brutal occupation, and Penang Hill above it all.
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