Cambodia

Between 1970 and 1975, Jon Swain, the English journalist portrayed in David Puttnam's film, The Killing Fields, lived in the lands of the Mekong river. This is his account of those years, and the way in which the tumultuous events affected his perceptions of life and death as Europe never could. He also describes the beauty of the Mekong landscape - the villages along its banks, surrounded by mangoes, bananas and coconuts, and the exquisite women, the odours of opium, and the region's other face - that of violence and corruption.

Indochina, 1936: Charlie Chaplin and his co-star and lover, Paulette Goddard, are on vacation in Asia following the release of the global superstar's silent masterpiece, Modern Times. Evading the press in Phnom Penh, he is inspired to work on a new film idea – imagining his iconic alter ego, the Tramp, in the colonial rubber plantations. But Charlie Chaplin's presence in the French protectorate has encouraged Cambodians to speak out for real against colonial exploitation and the authorities are nervous about his visit. As the middle-aged filmmaker grapples with his creativity and his conscience, a deepening friendship with a Cambodian comic actor and anti-colonial communist eventually forces him to choose between lending his celebrity status to their cause or keeping silent. Fictionalised around real events, Charlot is a story about how an embittered Charlie Chaplin abandons his silent Tramp in order to find his own voice in the politically turbulent 1930s.

Historical fiction. 12th Century Cambodia, birthplace of the lost Angkor civilisation. In a village behind a towering stone temple lives a young woman named Sray, whom neighbours liken to the heroine of a Hindu epic. Hiding a dangerous secret, she is content with quiet obscurity, but one rainy season afternoon is called to a life of prominence in the royal court. There her faith and loyalties are tested by attentions from the great king Suryavarman II. Struggling to keep her devotion is her husband Nol, palace confidante and master of the silk parasols that were symbols of the monarch's rank. In telling her tale, Sray takes the reader to a hilltop monastery, a concubine pavilion and across the seas to the throne room of imperial China. She witnesses the construction of the largest of the temples, Angkor Wat, and offers an explanation for its greatest mystery - why it broke with centuries of tradition to face west instead of east. A novel which revives the rites and rhythms of the ancient culture that built the temples of Angkor, then abandoned them to the jungle.