Noe l. Barber Boeken

John Dexter behoort tot een belangrijke Britse dynastie, Julie Soong tot een minstens zo belangrijke Chinese dynastie. Tegen de indringende en schilderachtige achtergrond van Singapore tijdens het koloniale Engelse bewind worden John en Julie hopeloos verliefd op elkaar. De invloedrijke families zijn fel gekant tegen de relatie van de geliefden en proberen ze uit alle macht te scheiden. Terwijl de Tweede Wereldoorlog uitbreekt, ontwikkelt zich een klassiek drama vol intriges en haat.

Sonia Riccardi, impetuous and sensual, is a woman no man could resist. And Larry Astell, heir to a champagne fortune, knows their passion is the most important part of his life. Until war places in jeopardy all they held dear - love, family and country. From the Left Bank of the 1930s to Nazi-occupied Paris, A FAREWELL TO FRANCE is a magnificent epic, played out against the tumultuous background of the time: a decadent French government, the life of a foreign correspondent, the grandeur of the champagne regions and the glory of the French Resistance.

Only three short years after the end of the Japanese occupation, war came again to Malaya. The Chinese-backed guerrillas called it the War of the Running Dogs - their contemptuous term for those in Malaya who remained loyal to the British. The British Government referred to this bloody and costly struggle as the 'Malayan Emergency'. Yet it was a war that lasted twelve years and cost thousands of lives. By the time it was over Malaya had obtained its independence - but on British, not on Chinese or Communist terms. Here is the war as it was. Here are the planters and their wives on their remote rubber estates, the policemen, the generals and the soldiers, the Malays, Chinese and Indians of a polyglot country, all fighting an astute, ruthless, and well organized enemy.

The takeover, when it came, was quick, as expected. But the crushing strictness that followed was jolting. 'On May 24,' wrote one diarist, 'you could bribe everyone in Shanghai. On May 26 you could bribe no one - for perhaps the first time in a hundred years.

The story of two lovers and two great dynasties - one British, the other Chinese - of the society that separated them and the passion that bound them.

Tracing the childhood friendship between Mark Holt, son of the British resident and Serena Sirry, daughter of a court advisor, that blossoms into a passionate love affair, A Woman of Cairo also paints a fascinating picture of two different societies in a time of violent change.

The story of three Italian sisters; Raefella, Rosanna and Fiammetta, living under Mussolini in 1938 and the men who fell in love with them: Steve, an American playboy; Kurt, a German musician; Hamilton Johns, an English painter. Set in Florence at the beginning of the World War II, this is the last novel by Noel Barber, whose novels include TANAMERA, A FAREWELL TO FRANCE and A WOMAN OF CAIRO.

This story describes the dramatic lives of Prince Dmitri Korolev and his family caught up in the upheavals of European revolution and war. They flee Russia in 1919, escape to Switzerland and then Paris, but, with the Second World War, they come under further pressure from the Communist police. The author worked for many years in Paris as a foreign correspondent and wrote several novels including "Tanamera", "A Farewell to France", "A Woman of Cairo" and "The Other Side of Paradise".