ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Boxall

Bob Boxall was born in Surrey, England, one of eight children of parents who were both butchers. At sixteen he left home for the British Army, training as a Communications Technician and serving for eleven years — in Germany, England, and Cyprus, and on operations further afield, from the Falklands War to Zimbabwe's move to independence — before leaving as a Sergeant. In 1993 he emigrated to New Zealand, where he has lived ever since. His working life since the army has been spent largely in programme management — leading large-scale change and project-recovery work, much of it within telecommunications organisations. He lives in Auckland with his Thai wife, and has two children and six grandchildren.

His first visit to Thailand, in 2002, planted the seed of this novel. Sitting beside the Chao Phraya River at Bangkok's storied Oriental Hotel, he first encountered the story of Jim Thompson — the American silk magnate who walked into the jungle of the Cameron Highlands on Easter Sunday, 1967, and was never seen again.

The question of that morning stayed with him for two decades. To answer it — or to sit honestly with the fact that it may never be answered — he went to the places themselves: the Jim Thompson House in Bangkok, where Thompson once lived and worked, and the weavers' houses of the community beside it; the hillside villages of northern Thailand; a reservoir; and the cemetery on the ridge beside Lanna Hill House in Mae On, where the story was born. Khum Chao Burirat is the result — a novel about memory, inheritance, and the cost of uncovering what a house would rather keep. It rests on a single conviction: that some questions, honestly held, become their own kind of answer.