num_pages: 470
description: One hundred and sixty years ago a young Englishman founded a private raj on the coast of Borneo. The world he created eventually took in a territory the size of England, its expansion campaigns paid for in human heads. Here, polite Victorian conventions coexisted tenuously with one of the most violent cultures on earth, often with startling pockets of tenderness and extreme brutality appearing where least expected.Into this world flowed a small tribe of adventurers, fugitives, criminals, and saints-- the madly talented and simply mad. And the women wives and would-be wives, spinster nursemaids and heartless schemers, the rigidly virtuous and the virtually desperate. And always, the children, innocents too often the victims of an elemental nature both lush and deadly.Kalimantaan is the story of this world, these people. But the deeper story resides in the realm of the heart. It is about love in absurd conditions, the tenacity of it as well as our ability to miss it repeatedly and with perverse genius.
language: English
title: Kalimantaan
titlecomplete: Kalimantaan
genres: Fiction, Historical, Asia, Adventure, Literature, Novels, Contemporary, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 365
awards: awardedAt: 883641600000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, awardedAt: 915177600000
name: PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
publisher: Holt Paperbacks