Amir Falique
In planning for a long-weekend trip to the oil-rich Sultanate of Brunei, I struggled to find a suitable book to read. It's a small country, without much of a tradition for prose fiction and a population whose first language is not English. It was always going to be a bit of a tough one to crack. Ann Morgan's pick for the country did not really inspire much confidence either. I happened to glance at the comment section to Morgan's Brunei post, and someone mentioned a book about a Bruneian astronaut, which at the very least promised to be more amusing than Morgan's hokey Dan Brown-esque hodgepodge.
I was indeed amused and entertained by The Forlorn Adventure. The storyline was interesting enough for some holiday reading, if at times a bit silly (but also kind of perfect for holiday poolside reading). What was particularly interesting however was the small glimpses the story offered into everyday Bruneian life (the protagonist cannot hug his fiancée before leaving on a mission as it would be "improper"; the Sultan is still the number-one big boss in the year 2525).
Also quite amusing was my request to write in the frontispiece. This required three hotel staff to consult each other, the Internet and various other staff members on the correct way to write all the hooks and dots of Malay written with the Arabic alphabet.
Since finishing the book, I see that Falique has published a number of other books in a detective series entitled the "Brunei Secret Intelligence Agency". I've also even managed to find another Bruneian writer, KH Lim, whose coming-of-age story Written in Black is a promising addition to the corpus of this little-read country.
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