The Tea Lords

A graceful, marvellously achieved improvisation that only a novelist of the greatest imagination and sympathy could have written - Julian Evans, "Guardian" Put it at the top of your reading list - S"tylist" Haasse has created a compelling piece of innovative historical fiction ... [She] effortlessly combines an evocation of the plantation's heady, lush vegetation with her articulation of the growing distance between man and wife. And her aptly chosen metaphors are all skillfully conveyed in Ina Rilke's translation - "Sunday Times" Displays a knowledgeable and intimate empathy for plantation life, sucking you into the steaming Indonesian jungles and cut-glass propriety of Dutch colonial society without suspending judgement on colonialism itself - "Metro" The large cast of characters is convincingly displayed and deftly manipulated. The evocation of Java is vivid and full of feeling - "Scotsman" Haasse's atmospheric historical novel receives an elegantly idiomatic translation from Ina Rilke ... an affecting portrait of a life devoted to duty, which asks whether the sacrifice was worth the emotional costs. - "Financial Times" Translated into graceful prose, this morally challenging work, constructed from documents and letters, has already become a novel by which others, inside and outside its tradition, can be judged. - "Independent"