Books from Brunei

Almayer's Folly, published in 1895, was Joseph Conrad's first novel. It is set in nineteenth-century Borneo and follows Kaspar Almayer, a Dutch trader who has spent twenty-five years trying to build a commercial life in the tropical interior. His marriage to a Malayan woman has grown bitter, and his only source of hope is his daughter, Nina. Almayer clings to a vision of returning with her to European society, imagining wealth and respectability waiting for them elsewhere.

The story traces the slow collapse of that vision. Almayer's own greed and racial prejudice work against him as steadily as the forest and river around him. Nina, caught between her father's European ambitions and her mother's world, becomes a figure at the center of these competing pressures. Conrad draws on his own years as a merchant seaman to ground the novel in specific physical detail, and the tensions between Western commercial ambition and local life on Borneo run through every chapter.

Conrad returned to many of the concerns raised here, including the collision of cultures and the consequences of self-deception, in his later and better-known works. The Borneo setting gives the novel a geographic weight that separates it from the drawing-room fiction of the same period.

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Abdul Malik's Brunei CookBook is a recipe collection focused on the cooking traditions of Brunei, a small sultanate on the northern coast of Borneo. The book covers dishes central to Bruneian daily life and celebrations, including Rendang Daging, a slow-cooked beef dish built on layered spices, and Ambuyat, a starchy preparation made from sago palm that is eaten with an assortment of dipping sauces. Grilled fish dishes such as Ikan Bakar, typically served with sambal, also appear among the recipes.

Beyond individual recipes, the book addresses the customs and social practices that surround mealtimes in Brunei. It describes how specific dishes connect to communal gatherings and ceremonies, offering context for why certain foods appear at particular occasions. Brunei's cuisine draws on Malay cooking traditions while reflecting the country's own local ingredients, including sago, which grows abundantly in the lowland forests of Borneo.

Sago starch, the base of Ambuyat, comes from the pith of the sago palm. Preparing it involves felling the tree, extracting the pith, and washing out the starch. The process has been part of daily food production in parts of Borneo for generations, and the book positions Ambuyat as one of the defining dishes of Bruneian identity.

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Ten-year-old Jonathan Lee is having a difficult week. His grandfather has died, his mother has left for Australia, and his older brother has been thrown out of the family home for joining a rock band. Jonathan is stuck at the funeral wake, absorbing his father's frustration, with no clear way to fix any of it. When he hides inside an empty coffin and ends up slipping away from the gathering, a small act of escape turns into something larger: a trip across Brunei to find his brother and bring him back for the funeral.

The novel is set in Brunei, a small sultanate on the northwest coast of Borneo. KH Lim uses the setting to move Jonathan through places and people rarely seen in fiction: glue-sniffing teenage delinquents known locally as poklans, houses said to be cursed, and eccentric shopkeepers in the country's backwaters. The tone balances dark humor with the real confusion of a child caught between adult decisions he cannot control.

Jonathan's search for his brother doubles as a search for the truth about why his mother left. The story stays close to his perspective, filtering family fracture and loss through the logic and stubbornness of a ten-year-old navigating a country small enough to cross but full of unexpected obstacles.

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