Lockdown is a curious thing. We all want to keep safe but if, like me, you find confinement can be a bit tedious, then why not give one of my books a try?
My ‘Bamboo Quartet’ is a collection of four novels set in SE Asia during WW2. They can be read in any order.
The good news is, I recently got the rights back for these books and to celebrate, I’ve relaunched them with new titles on my own Andaman Press. They are available on Kindle and in Paperback. Please see the below links.
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I’m proud to have been asked to write the regular Indie Author Spotlight for Asian Books Blog. Here’s a link to my first post–
Ann Bennett has just taken over our monthly column, Indie Spotlight, which focusses on indie authors and self-publishing.
Ann published her best-selling Bamboo trilogy, Bamboo Heart, Bamboo Island, and Bamboo Road, conventionally, through Monsoon Books. All three novels are set during and after World War Two, in Burma, Malaya and Thailand. Bamboo Heart won the inaugural Asian Books Blog Book of The Lunar Year, for the Year of the Horse.
Ann chose to self-publish her most recent novel, The Foundling’s Daughter. It concerns a mystery with its roots in British India, during the Raj.
To kick-off as our new columnist, Ann here introduces herself, and her work.
Hello, I’m Ann Bennett and I’m delighted to be the new regular contributor for Asian Books Blog.
A bit about me. I’m English. I live in Surrey and work in London, but I have a passion for Asia particularly South East Asia. I took my first trip to the region in 1985 when I was in my early twenties, travelling from Bangkok to Bali, via Singapore, by public transport and have returned many times since. My interest was first kindled because my father had been a prisoner of the Japanese in Thailand and I wanted to find out about where he’d spent the war. He’d served in the Indian Army in the 1930s on the North-West Frontier near Quetta, and had volunteered to be posted to the Malaya campaign where he was one of the 100,000 Allied soldiers captured by the Japanese at the Fall of Singapore in February 1942. As a prisoner of war he worked on the Thai-Burma railway in several camps in Thailand and ended the war in Shirikawa Camp in Taiwan. He managed to survive three and a half years of starvation, disease and brutal treatment, and the sinking of his transport ship, the Hofuku Maru, but he retained a life-long love of India, and could speak fluent Urdu. He died when I was a child, and as I grew older I became increasingly interested in finding out about what had happened to him during the war.
My research into my father’s wartime experiences gave me the idea for my first novel, Bamboo Heart. Dad’s own story, which I discovered in his Liberation Questionnaire in the National Archives in Kew, London, formed the basis of the plot. Bamboo Heart was published by Monsoon Books in 2013. It was shortlisted in the best fiction category for the Singapore Book Publishers Awards and won the Asian Books Blog’s award in the Year of the Horse. I followed it up with two further books about the second world war in South East Asia; Bamboo Island, about a rubber planter’s wife who is caught up in the Japanese invasion of Singapore, and Bamboo Road, about a member of the Thai underground whose life is ripped apart by the war.
I’ve just released my fourth novel, The Foundling’s Daughter, which is partly set in British India of the 1930s. This is my first experience of self-publishing, so I am learning the ropes with a bit of help from friends who have already trodden the path.
The Foundling’s Daughter tells the story of three women connected across the decades by mysterious events that took place in an orphanage in England in the 1930s that has its roots In British India. One strand is the story of Anna Foster, told in diary form. Anna is the wife of British army officer, who lives the life of a reluctant memsahib on the British cantonment in a fictitious Indian town called Kandaipur. I started writing the Indian section of the book in the late nineties when my children were small. Back then it was entitled Shivaji’s Ladder. At that time I did a lot of research into the social history and lives of the British in India during the latter years of the Raj which I drew upon when I was writing Anna’s story for The Foundling’s Daughter.
In my next post I will describe what I found out about the lives of British ex-pats in the British Raj.
Thanks to Kraftireader for a lovely review of the Foundling’s Daughter.
The Foundling’s Daughter written and self-published by Ann Bennett is available NOW in ebook and paperback format. The ebook is also included in the kindleunlimited scheme.
To buy link: https://amzn.to/2UC1iC6
Book Blurb
Three Women connected down the decades by a mystery from the 1930s, with its roots in British India and an orphanage in Berkshire.
In 1934, Anna Foster, the wife of a British Army Officer, privately harbouring pain and remorse, sets sail from Bombay on a fateful journey home, a letter from a charismatic stranger — orphanage superintendent, Reverend Ezra Burroughs — in her pocket.
Seventy-six years later, Connie Burroughs, Ezra’s daughter, now in her nineties and in a care home, still lives in fear of her dead father. She guards his secrets loyally, but with a lifetime of regrets.
Sarah Jennings, escaping an unhappy marriage, moves to be near her ageing father. She buys Cedar Lodge, the crumbling…
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Reblogging my interview earlier this week with Fiona McVie – authorsinterviews. Many thanks for having me on your blog Fiona!
Hello and welcome to my blog, Author Interviews. My name is Fiona Mcvie.
Let’s get you introduced to everyone, shall we? Tell us your name. What is your age?
Hi, I’m Ann Bennett and I had my 57th birthday a couple of weeks ago.
Fiona: Where are you from?
I was born in Pury End, a tiny village in Northamptonshire, England, but now live in Farnham in Surrey. In the interim I’ve lived in London, Paris (briefly), East Anglia, Devon and the Isle of Wight.
Fiona: A little about your self (ie, your education, family life, etc.).
I’m the youngest of six daughters. I went to school in Northampton, and on to study law at Cambridge. I then qualified as a solicitor in London and worked in the City for a couple of years before having time out to travel to India and South East Asia. My dad…
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Thanks to Kraftireader for your post about my Bamboo Trilogy and your wonderful review of Bamboo Heart.
I am so pleased to be involved in the blogtour celebrating and promoting the launch of Bamboo Road, which is volume three in a Southeast Asian WWII Trilogy. The trilogy includes Bamboo Heart, Bamboo Island and Bamboo Road and can be read in any order.
Product Details (as per amazon page)
Bamboo Heart – is available in ebook, paperback and audio download format.
Set in the Far East before and during the Second World War, Bamboo Heart captures the suffering and courage of prisoners of war of the Japanese. It tells the story of Tom Ellis, a prisoner enslaved on the infamous Death Railway in Thailand, and charts the journey of his daughter, Laura, who turns her back on her yuppie existence in eighties London to investigate her father’s wartime experience.
To buy link:
Bamboo Island – is available in ebook and paperback format.
A stranger appears on Juliet…
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From the River Kew to Kwai: A journey of discovery (Reproduced with the kind permission of the Editor and Friends of the National Archives. Documents WO 345/4 and WO 344/362/2 are held at The National Archives, London.)
Ann Bennett discusses how she traced her father’s records of army service and reveals the wealth of documentary sources that have survived.
Researching family history is a journey of discovery that can take you in many directions. There are different routes you can take: some are blind alleys and some super-highways to moments of enlightenment. This article is about my quest to find out about what happened to my father in the Far East during the Second World War. It took me on several trips to Thailand and also, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, to sources as far apart as Taiwan, the United States, London and Glasgow. It is a journey that is still not over – there are still avenues I would like to explore.
Please click on the link to download the full article MagnaRiverKwai
My last post was about my 1988 trip to Kanchanaburi with my mum. Another time I’ll share more photos and diary entries about our adventures in Songhkla and Hat Yai in Southern Thailand, and our week in Burma during the 1988 military crackdown. Now I’m getting back on track with the inspirations for Bamboo Heart, by posting about my four days in Penang in 1985, my only visit to that beautiful island.
It made a huge impression on me, enough to stay with me for decades and inspire the setting for two story-lines in Bamboo Heart, separated by fifty years. I would love to return one day.From photos and videos I’ve seen of modern day Georgetown, it is transformed from the low-rise, low-key atmospheric port I visited full of streets of shop-houses and colonial buildings into a to a bustling modern city of glass skyscrapers, although I understand that all the colonial buildings and Chinese shop-houses have been carefully restored and preserved.
Below are some photos of Georgetown that I took in 1985, and which inspired the sections of Bamboo Heart in which Laura visits Penang in 1986 on her quest to find more about her father’s past and track down the elusive Joy de Silva.
My visit to Penang was on a Bangkok to Bali Rover with Trailfinders, my first experience of travelling outside Europe. We had started out in Bangkok, visited Ayutiyah and Pattaya in Thailand, then boarded a night train to Butterworth in Malaysia. According to The Man in Seat 61, the trains look just the same now as they did then. I remember a fantastic night’s sleep on linen sheets and a cheap tasty meal washed down with Singha beer in the restaurant car.
Restaurant CarAt Butterworth we took the ferry to Georgetown – a great lumbering square boat. There wasn’t a road bridge then. I remember crossing the straits at sunset, standing out on deck in the warm evening, and watching the red sky and the mountains behind the town coming closer.
We took rickshaws to the Cathay Hotel, which features in Laura’s story in Bamboo Heart. I remember it being a shabby old Portuguese Villa, once beautiful and imposing, but even then very run down. The rooms were huge and high ceilinged, and it was unbelievably cheap. I don’t remember now whereabouts it was in Georgetown, but in the book I set it in a busy quarter, full of loud bars and cafes. I’ve googled it and it now has a certain shabby-chic cachet – described in the New York Times as follows: ‘You could say that the Cathay Hotel comes up short in just about every category. Except for that most elusive, yet most important measure of a hotel’s allure: character. There, the Cathay Hotel gets six stars.’
Here is my picture from 1985. My camera obviously didn’t like to tropical climate! All the photos from that trip came out dull and dark.
I would certainly have stayed at the Eastern and Oriental Hotel, but all we could afford was a coffee on the terrace. I think that coffee probably cost far more than a night at the Cathay Hotel. I made up for it by having Tom stay there on his first night in Georgetown.
We hired a jeep and toured the island, drove through the suburbs of Georgetown, into the hills and over to Batu Ferringhi, a beautiful white sand beach, which even then was fringed with modern luxury hotels. Here are a few photos I took of Penang beaches on that trip. Those beaches inspired some of the important scenes in the book, featuring Joy and Tom (I hope that isn’t a spoiler!)
Beaches in Penang. I believe this one is in Batu FerringhiWe also took the funicular railway up to Penang Hill to see the wonderful views across the shimmering straits towards Butterworth and the mainland. I remember eating satays in the little cafe there. I have used this location in both Tom’s story in the 1930s and Laura’s 1980s story.
We also visited the Penang State Museum and Art Gallery (this isn’t my photo, but again, a key scene in the book takes place inside this bulding)
The below photo (which is mine) of rickshaw riders resting in the trees near the museum in Georgetown inspired another scene in the book, I won’t say which one… if you’ve read Bamboo Heart, you’ll be able to guess.
Asian Books Blog has nominated Bamboo Heart for the book of the lunar year award. Here’s a link to my ‘500 words’ on Asian Books Blog about inspirations for Bamboo Heart.
http://www.asianbooksblog.com/2015/01/the-asian-books-blog-book-of-lunar-year.html
My first ever review from a professional reviewer – Raelee Chapman of the Singapore Review of Books. Very pleased indeed with that! Just stumbled across it whilst googling…
Ann Bennett’s Bamboo Heart begins with Tom Ellis, a captive of the Japanese working on the Death Railway in 1943, in solitary confinement. It is in these opening pages and the narrow confines of his pit prison that we learn what gives him the will to live. Tucked in his chest pocket is a photograph of a young Eurasian woman from Penang, Joy De Souza – this is but one of the threads in Bennett’s first installment of her WWII trilogy.
Bennett has given us a hybrid of sorts with alternating narratives between Tom Ellis and Laura Ellis, his daughter, a lawyer living in London in 1986. Tom’s narrative involves several non-linear time-splits of his pre-war life as a lawyer in London living out days of drudgery, and then as a young man managing a rubber plantation in Penang. Here we get a real sense of Tom’s paradisiacal life in…
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Ann Bennett 