From the international best-selling and award-winning author of The Pearl of Penang, A dramatic coming of age story, set against the backdrop of a tropical paradise torn apart by civil war.
Sixteen-year-old Jasmine Barrington hates everything about living in Kenya and longs to return to the island of Penang in British colonial Malaya where she was born. Expulsion from her Nairobi convent school offers a welcome escape – the chance to stay with her parents' friends, Mary and Reggie Hyde-Underwood on their Penang rubber estate.
But this is 1948 and communist insurgents are embarking on a reign of terror in what becomes the Malayan Emergency. Jasmine must confront heartache, a shocking past secret and mortal danger.