Distant Archipelagos

He helped conceal an escaped prisoner in a hilarious fake jail-break, trailed the Sultan of Pahang on a regal progress through Malaysia's largest state and befriended one of President Soekarno's infamous red beret parachutists, sent on a sabotage mission during the height of Indonesian confrontation. Mostly he loved the land and its people, so much that he shunned the cocktail circuit and the city life for the simple pleasures of the kampong and the open road, learning the language and feeling his way towards what French author Henry Fauconnier had called "the Soul of Malaya". With Distant Archipelagos, Peter Moss follows up his account of an Anglo-Indian childhood, in Bye-Bye Blackbird, by painting a vivid portrait of another vanished world.