Overview

When the Japanese take Borneo in 1942, Agnes Keith is captured and imprisoned with her two-year-old son. Fed on minimal rations, forced to work through recurrent bouts of malaria and fighting with rats for scraps of food, Agnes Keith's spirit never completely dies. Keeping notes on scraps of paper which she hides in her son's home-made toys or buries in tins, she records a mother's pain at watching her child go hungry and her poignant pride in his development within these strange confines. She also describes her captors in all their complexity. Colonel Suga, the camp commander, is an intelligent, highly educated man, at times her adversary, at others a strange ally in a distorted world.

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9780907871286

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"""one of the most remarkable books you will ever read"" John Carey, Sunday Times"

one of the most remarkable books you will ever read John Carey, Sunday Times

Author Information

Agnes Keith was a young and promising journalist in San Francisco in November 1934 when she was savagely mugged by a drug addict with a two foot iron pipe on the doorstep of the San Francisco Examiner. During her long recovery from the resultant skull fractures, loss of memory and eyesight damage, she travelled a lot and on her return to California, somewhat restored, she met an Englishman, Harry Keith, whom she married and settled down to live with in Sandakan in N Borneo. Miraculously, she seems to have made a full recovery from her head injuries and to have regained all of her writing talents, which she lavished on three-books about her life in Borneo before, during and after the Second World War.

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