Pramoedya Ananta Toer Books In Order

This Earth of Mankind

Minke is a young Javanese student of great intelligence and ambition. Living equally among the colonists and colonized of 19th century Java, he battles against the confines of colonial strictures. It is his love for Annelies that enables him to find the strength to embrace his world.

Child of All Nations

This is the second in a series of four novels which emerged from the time Toer spent as a political prisoner, without trial, from 1965 to 1979 on Eastern Indonesia’s Buru Island. The novel follows the political awakening of its hero, the extraordinary Minke.

Footsteps

The third in a series of four novels, set at the turn of the century, which chronicle the birth of modern Indonesia through the story of Minke, an aspiring Javanese writer who struggles to understand his divided world. Here, he begins to find his feet as a political organizer.

House of Glass

Narrated by Pangemanann, a native policeman assigned to monitor Minke and his followers, this novel offers a story and meditation on the role of the native collaborator with colonialism. It tells the mulitfaceted tale of Indonesia’s birth as a nation.

The Fugitive

Written while Pramoedya Ananta Toer was imprisoned by the Dutch for his role in the Indonesian revolution after World War II, The Fugitive was his first major novel and the first to be published in the United States. Set during the final days of World War II, The Fugitive tells the harrowing story of a young platoon leader who has led a failed nationalist revolt against Japanese forces occupying Indonesia. Betrayed by a co conspirator and forced to disguise himself as a beggar, he sets out to find his fiancee, while eluding the military forces who will kill him if they capture him. Combining acute political and social criticism with a gripping, deeply moving narrative, this timeless story of a soldier’s return home will haunt the memories of all who read it.

The Girl From the Coast

From the world renowned author of The Mute’s Soliloquy and The Buru Quartet comes a heartbreaking novel about innocence and power. In feudal Java, where both privilege and poverty lived side by side, women were little more than chattel. Pramoedya s The Girl From the Coast tells the story of a beautiful young woman from a fishing village who finds herself in an arranged marriage with a wealthy aristocrat. Forced to leave her parents and home behind, she moves to the city to become the ‘lady’ of her husband s house. After she becomes pregnant, she learns that she is merely a ‘practice wife’ who will not simply be discarded but will be separated from the child she carries. Pramoedya s breathtaking literary skill is evident in every word of this book, one of his classic works of fiction made especially poignant because it is based on the life of his own grandmother.

It’s Not an All Night Fair

Now available for the first time in English, a classic from ‘a novelist who should get in line for the Nobel Prize’ Los Angeles Times Pramoedya Ananta Toer is Indonesia’s most celebrated writer, with over thirty works of fiction translated into over thirty languages, and the recipient of many major international awards, including the grand prize in the Fu*kuoka Asian Culture Prize competition, Japan’s highest literary honor. Narrated in the first person in Pramoedya’s signature style, It’s Not an All Night Fair tells the deeply affecting story of a son returning home to central Java to confront the fact of his father’s death. Struggling to understand his reticent father, the son embarks on a personal quest to find value and meaning not only in his father’s life but also in his own.

Tales From Djakarta

This translation of fiction by the well known and suppressed Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer is a welcome addition for any reader. With little traditional narrative structure and an often angry, ironical tone, these stories are intensely regional in flavor and modern in approach and make no apology for these facts. Usefully provided with footnotes in sections where translation of Pramoedya’s language is especially difficult or distracts from the flavor of the story altogether and is thus maintained in the original, this collection includes such works as Stranded Fish, Creatures Behind Houses, and the great Ketjapi.

All That Is Gone

From one of the world’s most acclaimed writers comes a collection of beautiful short stories based on the author’s childhood. Pramoedya Ananta Toer is a major figure in world literature, listed in John Major’s rewrite of the famous Lifetime Reading Plan among the likes of James Baldwin, Bertolt Brecht, Graham Greene, and John Steinbeck as one of 100 authors everyone should read. A constant contender for the Nobel Prize, he recently won one of France’s highest literary awards and has won the highest award in Asian letters. In All That Is Gone, Pramoedya’s semiautobiographical stories deal with life’s major themes: birth and death, sexual knowledge and love, compassion and revenge. Some stories are written from a child’s point of view, others from that of an adult. But all are written in a style that quickly wraps the reader up in this master storyteller’s narrative web. This is the first time Pramoedya’s short fiction has been widely available to the English reading public; its publication represents a significant addition to the canon of world literature in translation.

The Mute’s Soliloquy

From the author of the Buru Quartet and one of the greatest writers of our time comes a remarkable memoir of imprisonment and survival. In 1965, Pramoedya Ananta Toer was detained by Indonesian authorities and eventually exiled to the penal island of Buru. Without a formal accusation or trial, the onetime national hero was imprisoned on Buru for eleven years. He survived under brutal conditions, somehow managing to produce his masterwork, the four novels of the Buru Quartet, as well as the remarkable journal entries, essays, and letters that comprise this moving memoir. Reminiscent of the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Mute’s Soliloquy is a harrowing portrait of a penal colony and a heartbreaking remembrance of life before it. With a resonance far beyond its particular time and place, it is Pramoedya’s crowning achievement a passionate tribute to the freedom of the mind and a celebration of the human spirit.’A haunting record of a great writer’s attempt to keep his imagination and his humanity alive.’ The New York Times Book Review’A story too vast and serious to ignore.’ San Francisco Chronicle front page review

Exile

‘Fascinating…
endlessly sad.’ Noam Chomsky

In these remarkable interviews with Andr Vltchek and Rossie Indira, edited by Nagesh Rao, Indonesia’s most celebrated writer speaks out against tyranny and injustice in a young and troubled nation. Toer here discusses personal and political topics he could never before address in public.

Toer is best known for his novels comprising the Buru Quartet. The New York Times described his autobiography as a ‘haunting record of a great writer’s attempt to keep his imagination and his humanity alive under terrible conditions.’ Toer is widely considered a strong candidate for the Nobel prize in Literature.