Travel the trade winds from far east Indonesia to the Lion City aboard a Bugis spice ship named God Bless. A young English backpacker runs into a bunch of French adventurers on a remote Indonesian island and gets swept up in their madcap scheme to buy a traditional wooden sailing ship from a people once famed as pirates—the Bugis—and sail it to distant Singapore.
Bugis Nights harks back to a Golden Age of travel, and a young man’s quest for adventure. Be magically transported between the sun-drenched islands and stormy crests of the Java Sea, the high roads of the Himalayas, and the promise of love, fostered in a Tibetan sandstorm.
“I felt secure on this deck, at this task. The ship’s various creaks and groans took on now the comforting liturgy of prayer. A port was an alien abstraction, an unwanted intrusion—’Kurnia Ilahi’ was our homeland now.”
Extract from ‘Bugis Nights’ by Chris Stowers
“The sea is the largest wilderness of all. The longer you spend on water the closer you come to interpreting its language of deep silence … With growing unease, you realize how little it cares if you perish or survive.”
Extract from ‘Bugis Nights’ by Chris Stowers
“I clung to the neck of this flighty wooden dolphin … only the breeze, still warmed by the memory of the sun, alerted me to place in time, hitting my face from the unseen future, on its way to a forgotten past.”
Extract from ‘Bugis Nights’ by Chris Stowers
