CATEGORY

Saman is a story filtered through the lives of its feisty female protagonists and the enigmatic "hero" Saman. It is at once an expos of the oppression of plantation workers in South Sumatra, a lyrical quest to understand the place of religion and spirituality in contemporary lives, a playful exploration of female sexuality and a story about love in all its guises, while touching on all of Indonesia's taboos: extramarital sex, political repression and the relationship between Christians and Muslims.

Saman has taken the Indonesian literary world by storm and sold over 150,000 copies in the Indonesian language, and is now available for the first time in English.