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From Goodreads where it has a 4.17 rating with 964 ratings and 118 reviews:

Agnes Keith’s story of her imprisonment in a Borneo internment camp by the Japanese during WW II is awe inspiring and amazing in so many ways. She presents her three plus years of captivity in all its horrible details but she doesn’t ask the reader to feel sorry for her – more to gain strength from what she and her young son George went through and how they survived. Her civil-service British husband is kept in an adjacent camp and his situation and those of British and Australian POWs are heartbreakingly detailed as well.

In the last pages of this book she makes a very moving statement which greatly affected me, “I now know the value of freedom. In all of my life before I had existed as a free woman, and I didn’t know it. This is what freedom means to me. The right to live with, to touch and to love, my husband and my children. The right to look about me without fear of seeing people beaten. The capacity to work for ourselves and our children. The possession of a door, and a key with which to lock it. Moments of silence. A place in which to weep, with no one to see me doing so. The freedom of my eyes to scan the face of the earth . . . without barbed wire across my vision. The freedom of my body to walk . . . and no sentry to stop me. Opportunity to earn the food to keep me strong.”

This book was a page-turner and I highly recommend it.

*******

This is a beautifully written first-hand story of a mother’s account of the human will to survive…the struggle to go on for her child’s sake. The setting is a Japanese prisoners’ of war camp in Borneo during WW II. I wish this woman would to have had a spiritual relationship with God to depend on as her rock during this horrible period. The reader needs to have tissues handy.
I was given this first-edition book by my sister-in-law in 2002 as one two first-edition books she got for $1.00 each from Pike County, AL library “share” stack. The other book is Never Dies the Dream by Margaret Landon. Landon is better known for her first book Anna and the King of Siam which became known popularly through the musical The King and I, one of my favorites!

*******

…This book is far more interesting than depressing. What I especially like is Keith’s even handedness. She writes “The Japanese in this book are as war made them, not as God did, and the same is true for the rest of us. War is always the story of hate; it makes no difference with whom one fights. The hate destroys you spiritually as the fighting destroys you bodily. If there are tears shed here, they are for the death of good feeling. If there is horror, it is for those who speak indifferently of “the next war”. If there is hate, it is for hateful qualities, not nations. If there is love, it is because this alone kept me alive and sane.”

There was a film version made in 1950 with Claudette Colbert. I saw it years ago and was the reason I took this book off the bookstore shelf. It was actually on last night but now I don’t think I could watch Claudette in an internment camp in full make up. Ah, Hollywood.

*******

The epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including the Send-to-Kindle feature in Amazon.

Download  the mobi file for Amazon devices except the Send to Kindle feature  here.

The reading level is 7.6 on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. This book is in the public domain due to the author’s death in 1944 in Normandy. Copyright in the U.K. lasts for 70 years after the author’s death.

Reviews from Goodreads (4.18 rating with 620 ratings and 36 reviews):

One of the most vivid books of WW2 reportage ever written. It reads as quirky and unvarnished as ever and captures the brutality and sheer oddness of tank warfare.

An excellent book. What distinguishes it from the very many desert war memoirs is the details of daily life. This is because the book was built-up from very detailed diary entries, so that the excitement of looting some decent coffee, for example, or the author’s irritation at getting his prized uniform damaged beyond repair by the regimental doctor (to save his life!) are recorded in a detail rarely seen in more sweeping memoirs. This makes it a fascinating read in which one comes closer to understanding the actual life of a desert rat than in any other book I’ve read…

A marvelous read , full of humour and humanity. It has the ring of truth full of characters well described. He does not hide from the sheer awfulness of war but the anecdotes and lively description of his situation raise this memoir above the ordinary. Can recommend.

No preliminary b.s. in this book. By page 3 the author has gone A.W.O.L. from his desk job and headed into the North African desert to fight in Crusader tanks. This is small book but is full of terrible fighting, down time and the constant search for food, water and loot. It shows all the confusion of combat and how horrendous some of the injuries can be.

The author survived North Africa only to be killed on his third day in Normandy.

With this gripping and moving memoir Keith Douglas made a truly valuable contribution to the literary canon of the Second World War. Douglas drops us into his story with minimal introduction or context and ends with a trivial and tasteless comment about going out to gather loot. What happens to Keith and his unit, the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, after they leave Zem Zem is left unexplained. This is a book written very much in the moment, and Douglas’ observations and comments on his comrades, the enemy, his surroundings, and the war in general, have an immediacy that would likely be lost in a work written more analytically or at greater distance.

His wry observations are often both memorable, amusing and affecting: “it is exciting and amazing to see thousands of men, very few of whom have much idea why they are fighting, all enduring hardships, living in an unnatural, dangerous, but not wholly terrible world, having to kill and to be killed, and yet at intervals moved by a feeling of comradeship with the men who kill them and whom they kill, because they are enduring and experiencing the same things. It is tremendously illogical – to read about it cannot convey the impression of having walked through the looking-glass which touches a man entering a battle.” Douglas recognizes the irony and dark humour in the war and this suffuses his writing throughout the book, both in how he records his experiences and in his reflections on them.

Again he has the poets eye for beauty and emotional resonance, such as in this poignant passage: “Sometimes the surface of the desert where we halted for a few hours or a few days was thick with flowers which changed the ridges and hollows whose sandy colour had for weeks been relieved only by stones, the hiding places of scorpions – or the dead grey spouts of camelthorn – into undulating distances of blue-green. The sweet scent of the flowers would come up to your nostrils even in a tank turret, moving along; it could overcome all the odours of machines.” It’s not quite England’s green and pleasant land, and the war overshadows everything, but Douglas can readily tap into his own and his readers feelings, and not merely record the external details of his experiences. That same ability is apparent both in more pastoral passages such as the above, and in his more breathless memories of being under fire.

I’m glad I read this, and anyone with an interest in the Second World War will likely enjoy it. I’ll leave the last word of wisdom to Keith Douglas himself, in what is a fine proverb and rule for life:

“Books and flowers are invincible beautifiers. I have often used them to make horrible surroundings habitable.”