(As well as being available as both a paperback or a Kindle on the various Amazon sites, Barnes & Noble, etc, the book can also be ordered directly from my publisher, BookLocker, on: https://booklocker.com/books/9747.html You can also read the beginning of the novel on either website.)

This is the third and final part of my trilogy of novels set in Indonesia. This time the setting is Lombok, which is the island immediately east of Bali, which also depends heavily on tourism for its income. It is much quieter than Bali, though, and, most importantly, it is largely Muslim rather than Hindu-Buddhist.

Just after the Millennium in 2000, riots broke out all over Lombok. Churches were burned down and many people died. Although the surface reason for the violence seemed to be religious conflict, there were many other factors behind it, and a lot of the victims were of Chinese extraction. Similar riots had happened before in Lombok during the 1960s, when the target had again largely been Chinese citizens, although that time the ethnic issues were accompanied by an anti-Communist purge encouraged by the future dictator, Soeharto, in his struggle to gain power.

This is the political background to the novel, but the focus in the novel is much more on a group of transient people who live in Senggigi, which was then Lombok’s busiest tourist centre. Its main character is a middle-aged English woman, Denise, who has spent her life searching for something spiritual and meaningful, but whose new-found calm breaks down under the pressure of the riots and suddenly faces the inner contradictions of her life. There is a focus on east-west relationships in a globalised, post-colonial age, mixed with a look at inter-generational conflicts between post-war Boomers and their children.

Unlike my first two novels, this time I had no money at all for marketing and probably a big part of me also just wanted the last part of the trilogy to be over and done with so that I could move on and do something new in terms of my writing, so I got only one review. I must be honest and admit that this one, detailed below, came from a friend (although I had no idea she had written it until I suddenly saw it on my Amazon page). I think that her use of the word ‘peripatetic’ perfectly describes both the daily life in Senggigi and the kind of ex-pat lifestyle I was trying to capture in the book.

Review

A wonderfully evocative depiction of a holiday island after a scare that causes its lifeblood of tourism to depart leaving the locals to cope with the gap left from the mesh of east and west in the wake of their own destructive restiveness. The main characters reflect this confusion in their own personal search for meaning in their peripatetic lives. Thoughtful and thought-provoking.