Promo: Bamboo Heart by Ann Bennett

Today, I'm delighted to welcome back author Ann Bennett, with her fabulous release, Bamboo Heart: A Daughter's Quest. We're sharing an intriguing excerpt. Read on!

You can also win a copy of Ann's wonderful, evocative novel, The Lotus House. Make sure to check below for details!

Bamboo Heart: A Daughter's Quest is currently on blog tour with Rachel's Random Resources. Check out all the other fabulous posts on tour!

 

 

Bamboo Heart: A Daughter’s Quest

Ann Bennett

 

Excerpt:

Tom Ellis is a prisoner of war on the Thai-Burma railway, enduring starvation, forced labour and disease. He thinks back to his former life when he walked out of his boring job in the City of London to travel to Penang for work…

Tom sailed for Malaya the following Monday in the company of a group of other young single men, each with his own reason for heading East. He spent most of the voyage lying on his bunk in the tiny cabin, or on the deck, reading. He had the occasional drink, but managed to resist the temptation to fritter away all his savings drinking at the bar or gambling at blackjack in the games room.

As the ship headed east and the weather grew warmer, the atmosphere on board began to change. People grew more relaxed and sociable. Tom relaxed too, and his spirits rose. He began to forget the boredom and frustrations of the last few years. He began to look forward to his new existence.

Six weeks later they docked at Georgetown on Penang Island. As Tom walked down the gangplank onto the shore he could see instantly why they called Penang the ‘Pearl of the Orient’. He was enchanted.

Georgetown was a gleaming colonial town with white stuccoed buildings set around spacious squares and greens. It oozed oriental charm. Tom was taken to the offices of United Rubber by rickshaw; his luggage followed behind on another one. He sat back on the leather seat and absorbed the sights. The rickshaw took him through the Chinese quarter. The streets were teeming with people and lined with shop-houses, their shutters painted in pastel shades. They were filled with every imaginable thing for sale, the goods flowing out onto the pavements. The rickshaw trundled past ornate Chinese temples, English churches and exotic mosques with towering minarets.
After signing his contracts at the offices, he was taken back to the waterfront to spend his first night at the Eastern and Oriental Hotel. That evening he had a taste of the good life that was to be his for the next three years. He had a butler and a valet to look after him in his room. He took cocktails on the terrace, overlooking the harbour, and then ate a three-course meal in the sumptuous dining room, surrounded by potted palms and cooled by fluttering ceiling fans.

The next morning he was met by the company agent and taken by pony trap up into the hills to the plantation. He was shown his bungalow, complete with three servants: a houseboy, a garden boy and a cook. The bungalow was built on a hillside, with a view over the tops of the rubber trees and towards the distant hills and the sea.
The very next day he started work. His job was to oversee the production of rubber on a four-hundred-acre plantation of trees. The work was undemanding and the rewards grossly disproportionate to the effort required of him. Most of the workers under him were Hokkien Chinese, some Tamil. Over the next few months he quickly learned the rudiments of both languages, and as a result increased production on his patch considerably.

His days passed in a fairly predictable routine. He would rise early, bathe in the water brought to him by the houseboy, and have a simple breakfast on the veranda. He would then walk down to the headquarters of the estate, meet his gang of workers and discuss with them about which trees were to be tapped that day. As they got on with the work, he would walk around the plantation and ensure that everything was going to plan.

In the afternoon the workers would bring back buckets full of latex to the plantation headquarters to be measured into the vats. Tom’s job was simply to record what each worker had brought so that they could be paid the correct sum at the end of the week.
It had been pure bliss for Tom. To sit on the veranda once work was done for the day, watching the sun go down over the rubber plantation, sipping a gin sling that the house boy had mixed for him, listening to the cicadas in the frangipani trees behind the bungalow, gazing at the distant blue-grey hills. Or to spend the evenings dancing at the club to a jazz orchestra, or to run off to his chaste meetings with Joy, so laden with unspoken desire.

He lay there now on the bare bunk, his stomach still grumbling after the meagre evening meal, the bamboo slats digging into his bony spine. It seemed scarcely believable that he had been that carefree man lazing on the veranda in Penang, that he had ever led that life of simple pleasure and luxury.
He thought back to the shock he had experienced the first time he had endured hard labour when they arrived at camp. The men had been ordered to clear a section of jungle for the railway track and were given only the most basic of tools to chop down great thickets of bamboo and towering trees, to drag them out by fixing ropes around them and pulling them in teams. He remembered how his whole body had ached painfully after the first day, how blisters had formed on his feet and hands, how his muscles had seized up in protest. 

The months wore on. From clearing the jungle for the railway, they were building it, moving stones and earth by hand in wicker baskets, handful by handful, to build embankments, chipping through solid rock with rudimentary tools to make cuttings through the hillsides, constructing bridges from logs of wood they had felled. And all the time, they were forced on by the guards, who lashed them and shoved them and screamed at them to work faster: ‘Work, work! Speedo, speedo!’

 ~~~

Blurb:

From award-winning author Ann Bennett comes a captivating WW2 novel of love and survival - a daughter’s journey of discovery and a soldier’s strength in the bleakest of times.

When Laura Ellis, a successful city lawyer, arrives home to see her dying father Tom, a mysterious stranger is watching the house. This leads her to embark on a journey to discover their connection.

To do so, she has to retrace her father’s steps; to the Bridge on the River Kwai: where as a prisoner of war of the Japanese, Tom endured disease, torture and endless days of slavery; and to the beautiful island of Penang, to uncover his secrets from the 1930s.

For Tom made himself a promise: to return home. Not to the grey streets of London, where he once lived, but to Penang, where he found paradise and love.

As Laura searches for the truths Tom refused to tell her, in the places where he once suffered, lived and loved, she will finally find out the story behind his survival, and discover her own path to love and happiness.

This book has previously been published both as Bamboo Heart and as A Daughter's Quest. It won the won the award for fiction published in Asia, Asian Books Blog, 2015 and was shortlisted for "Best Fiction Title" in the Singapore Book Awards 2016.

Praise for A Daughter’s Quest:
 

'A powerful story brilliantly told. Five Stars.' 
~ Richard Kandler, author of The Prisoner List.

'This outstanding novel is a powerful reminder of what prisoners of the Japanese suffered...'
~ Amazon reviewer.

Buy Link: https://books2read.com/u/mllPNW

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About the Author:

Ann Bennett is a British author of historical fiction. Her first book, Bamboo Heart: A Daughter's Quest, was inspired by researching her father's experience as a prisoner of war on the Thai-Burma Railway and by her own journey to uncover his story. It won the Asian Books Blog prize for fiction published in Asia in 2015, and was shortlisted for the best fiction title in the Singapore Book Awards 2016.

 

That initial inspiration led her to write more books about WWII in Southeast Asia - Bamboo Island: The Planter's Wife, A Daughter's Promise, Bamboo Road: The Homecoming, The Tea Planter's Club, The Amulet, and The Fortune Teller of Kathmandu. Along with The Lotus House, published in October 2024, they make up the Echoes of Empire Collection.

Ann is also the author of The Oriental Lake Collection - The Lake Pavilion and The Lake Palace, both set in British India during the 1930s and WWII, and The Lake Pagoda and The Lake Villa, set in French Indochina during the same period. A Rose in the Blitz – the first in the Sisters of War series and set in London during WWII, was published in March 2024.

The Lake Pagoda won a bronze medal for historical fiction in Asia in the Coffee Pot Book Club, Book of the Year awards 2022. The Fortune Teller of Kathmandu won a silver medal for dual-timeline historical fiction, and A Rose in the Blitz won bronze in the historical romance category in the Coffee Pot Book Club, Book of the Year awards 2024.

The Runaway Sisters, USA Today bestselling The Orphan House, The Child Without a Home and The Forgotten Children are set in Europe during the same era and are published by Bookouture. Her latest book, The Stolen Sisters, published on 29th November 2024 is the follow-up to The Orphan List (published by Bookouture in August this year) and is set in Poland and Germany during WWII.

A former lawyer, Ann is married with three grown up sons and a granddaughter and lives in Surrey, UK. For more details, please visit www.annbennettauthor.com.

Connect with Ann:

Twitter: https://x.com/annbennett71
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/annbennettauthor/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/annbennettauthor/

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*Giveaway to Win a Paperback copy of The Lotus House by Ann Bennett (Open INT)*

*Terms and Conditions –Worldwide entries welcome.  

Please enter using the Rafflecopter box below.  The winner will be selected at random via Rafflecopter from all valid entries and will be notified by Twitter and/or email. If no response is received within 7 days then Rachel’s Random Resources reserves the right to select an alternative winner. Open to all entrants aged 18 or over.  Any personal data given as part of the competition entry is used for this purpose only and will not be shared with third parties, with the exception of the winners’ information. This will passed to the giveaway organiser and used only for fulfilment of the prize, after which time Rachel’s Random Resources will delete the data.  I am not responsible for despatch or delivery of the prize.