The Sleeper

Kenneth Eales was born in a two-up, two-down terrace in Wimbledon during the Depression, the son of a family with no money, no connections, and no particular plan. He ended his working life having run one of the largest plantation groups in Southeast Asia, survived a communist insurgency, and navigated the collapse of the British Empire from the inside.

The Sleeper traces the journey between those two points with wit, candour and considerable surprise. Arriving in Malaya in 1956 as a twenty-one-year-old RAF veteran with a gift for numbers and an instinct for people, Eales spent thirty-five years learning to read cultures, politics and rooms that many of his contemporaries never tried to understand. The results

were sometimes spectacular, occasionally disastrous, and always illuminating.

This is a vanishing world rendered with hard-won authority: rubber estates and monsoon rains, corporate intrigue in Kuala Lumpur, the 1969 racial riots, a cattle farm in New South Wales that humbled him in ways the boardroom never quite managed. A British memoir of wartime London, the end of empire, and forty years in the heart of colonial and post-independence Malaysia.

Above all it is the portrait of a man who was hiding in plain sight all along: watching, learning, and always finishing what he started.