When Tim Hannigan first arrived in Indonesia in 2002 as an earnest backpacker with a passion for history, he headed for Bali's best bookshop in the tourist enclave of Kuta Beach. Among the bright shelves full of books about Indonesia were plenty of heavy tomes and weighty academic histories about the country, but not one pithy non-scholarly narrative history for the general reader.

That literary vacuum he himself set out to fill a decade later wi