Book 72: The Tea Lords, Hella S Haasse

This is a book I picked up when I was in Amsterdam last summer - the chap in the bookshop said it was a "Dutch Classic" and it was indeed very evocative of a certain time and way of life, in colonial Java on the tea plantations. Parts of it read very well and I enjoyed a lot; other parts were a bit more slow.  It's not really fiction, although it's a novel  - it's based around real people and constructed largely from documents, diaries, letters, etc (though not left in that form). I think this is perhaps the reason for the uneven way it reads.