Kalimantaan

Discover an astonishing new literary voice, and rediscover the art and magic of storytellingThere are some stories so strange yet full of heart that they are told and retold in the bars and backwaters of the world. This is one of that rare breed--a story of bizarre achievement and singular love.

A hundred and fifty years ago, a young Englishman founded a private raj on the coast of Borneo. The world that resulted, boasting stone quays, great swaths of lawn, three Christian churches, and musical levees, eventually encompassed a territory the size of England, its campaigns paid for in human heads.

It is the story of Victorian social mores superimposed on one of the most violent cultures on earth, of pockets of terness amid extreme brutality, and of a remarkable tribe of fugitives, missionaries, and romantics drawn to this remote outpost of the world.

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. In the end, it is about love enduring when nothing else is left.

C. S. Godshalk, who lives north of Boston, began Kalimantaan while working in southeast Asia. Her short fiction has been widely anthologized, her last two stories selected by Mark Helprin and Richard Ford for Best American Short Stories. Of one, Joseph Coates in the Chicago Tribune said, "a small Flaubertian masterpiece, alone worth the price of the book."