I got a proof copy of The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan at the Hay festival last year and finally read it on my commute in June. It is exactly my kind of book, given that it is a historical novel set in World War Two in Malaysia, and that I have long been fascinated by this period in Malaysia’s history (see my blogs on Jungle Soldier, When The Future Comes Too Soon, The Malayan Trilogy, The Glass Palace and A Town Like Alice).

Cecily is highly intelligent and needs more in her mid-1930s life than being a wife to Gordon, who works for the British administration, and a mother to her children. When she meets Japanese Fujiwara she falls under his spell, shares his dream of Asia governed by Asians, and vows to help him to achieve it. She is soon spying for the Japanese, picking up her husband’s papers, hovering at his meetings and feeding the information she gleans back to Fujiwara until she becomes indispensable to him and helps him to come up with the most audacious plan possible for the Japanese invasion of Malaya.

In 1945 her broken family are living with the consequences of Japanese occupation. Her son Abel is missing and struggling to survive at the Kanchanaburi labour camp on the Thai-Burma railway and one daughter is in hiding so that she doesn’t become a ‘comfort girl’ to the Japanese soldiers. Cecily blames herself for it all. As the war comes towards its end, no-one is left untouched and it’s hard to see how she and her family can survive it.

This is a beautifully written, well-paced and well-plotted novel based on the author’s family’s experiences of British and Japanese occupied Malaya. It has a completely fresh take on the impact of the double occupation on one family. A must-read.