Set in the heart of Borneo's millennial magnificence, a rolling adventure unfolds from Churchill's War Cabinet Rooms to Japan's Imperial Palace as brutality rains down on a guileless people whose hopes for freedom come to focus on a man who fights to save them, his oilfields and the woman he loves.
Sarawak, 1937; Geoffrey Portas arrives to work in the oilfields of Borneo. Exotica substitutes the tedium of his homeland and cerulean seas replace grey English winters. Gripped by location and circumstance, life's inertia is further despatched as Vong Tan, the daughter of Chinese timber tycoon, walks into his life. Developing a relationship in a way he never dreamt possible, his life in the sultry sanctuary of colonial grandeur exceeds all expectations. Then, life is torn asunder. Japanese bombs rain down across the Pacific. Asian attitudes change as the avaricious, compassionless minority sense the loosening of their colonial shackles. Conscripted into Britain's Special Operations Executive, he sets about fighting a merciless enemy.
Paul Leslie Smith is an expatriate engineer who has spent seventeen years working in Malaysia, the first four of which were at Miri, Sarawak's Shell town. An avid reader, he has always harboured an interest in Southeast Asian history from the era of the Spice Islands and formation of the Straits Settlements through to present day. While satisfying his interests, research and discussion with older locals uncovered several rare, out of print works that revealed to him the dramatic events that Sarawak underwent during the Japanese Occupation. Those findings have inspired the novel Rainforest Tears: A Borneo Story
