It is 1924 and the British rule Malaya. Frank is a colonial administrator in a remote district deep in the jungle. Rose is the innocent young bride he’s just brought out from England. Nony is the native mistress he’d previously abandoned, along with their four children.
When Rose arrives in Malaya, she knows nothing of her new husband’s past. But how long can she remain ignorant? Frank, Rose and Nony soon become entangled in vines of secrecy and lying, they are snagged by thorns of bribery and blackmail, and caught in sticky webs of bluff and counter-bluff. Something must give between them: but what?
Rosie's earlier novel, Olivia & Sophia, recounts the adventures of two bold women sailing to Asia from England at the beginning of the 19th century, in the wake of the man who married first one of them, Olivia, and then, when she died, the other, Sophia. Tom - Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles - was the remarkable founder of Singapore, and both his wives were tested as he made his name in the Eastward. Sexy Olivia faced temptation to stray, and also ill-health. More matronly Sophia was confronted by tragedy on tragedy: her children's deaths; shipwreck; the death of her beloved Tom, leaving her the lonely widow who felt it her duty to secure his fame.
Lucía Orellana Damacela’s first poetry chapbook, Life Lines (Talbot-Heindl, 2018), is available in digital and print form on Amazon and in the publisher’s shop.
Lucía Damacela is the author of "The Festival", a story appearing in the short story collection Tales of Two Cities, a collaboration between the Singapore Writers' Group and the Hong Kong Writers' Circle, edited by Alice Clark-Platts, S. Mickey Lin, Edmund Price, and Harmony Sin.
Published by Ethos Books, and available for purchase here:
https://www.ethosbooks.com.sg/products/tales-of-two-cities