Flat White

Scarred by the past

11 June 2016

8:00 AM

11 June 2016

8:00 AM

In Indonesia in 1965–6 half a million communists and supposed communist sympathisers were murdered by a range of civilian and paramilitary organisations under the direction of the army.

This is the setting for Louise Doughty’s grim, ambitious novel. John Harper is a young operative in Jakarta, working for a Dutch private intelligence operation, providing information for corporations and doing covert work for various governments, chiefly the American.

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