The eccentric Mr Hare – as he was known to Sophia, the first wife of
Singapore founder Thomas Stamford Raffles – and his Asian harem are
brought vividly to life in this work of historical fiction set in
Southeast Asia. Arthur Grimsby is an ageing expat in 1960s Singapore.
Museum curator, ornithologist, freshly bereaved, he fears
Singapore’s looming independence and his redundancy and tries to
complete one final piece of work: the life story of an eccentric
19th-century Englishman called Alexander Hare. Hare was a trader and
slave-owner in the East and a friend of Thomas Stamford Raffles,
Lieutenant Governor of Java and the founder of Singapore, but Hare’s
chief claim to fame is as the creator of an Asian harem, including in
his collection women from Java, Bali, Sumatra, Sulawesi, Borneo, the
Malay Peninsula, China, India and Africa. Hare’s love of women and
his assembling of a harem, initially in Borneo and then on an
uninhabited atoll that would become the Cocos-Keeling Islands, made
him an object of guilty male fantasies and of strident female
resentments, the epitome of masculine, colonial exploitation. But
Arthur Grimsby’s paths are no straighter than Alexander Hare’s and
the two grow together as their destinies intertwine.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781912049752
Publisert
2020
Utgiver
Vendor
Dollarbird
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter