Revolusi

A magnificent fusion of oral history, sparkling analysis, and historical wisdom. Revolusi has it all: a masterpiece

Sebastian Mallaby

Real history invariably resides in the memories of ‘ordinary people,’ people who fall through the cracks, who are excluded from the ‘panoptic’ view of history, or the history of the victors (History with a capital H). Among the book’s many gifts—the depth of its research, the breadth of its inquiries, the poetry of its prose—it is this that has affected me the most: the insistence and humility of finding and allowing these voices, these eyewitnesses to history, to come to the fore. With scientific meticulousness and a rare narrative brilliance, Revolusi gives us a history at once vast and intimate, a history in colour

Laksmi Pamuntjak

David Van Reybrouk's book on the Democratic Republic of Congo was an extraordinary tour de force, setting a new standard for accessible and intelligent historical writing about sub-saharan Africa. His new work, Revolusi, is as passionate, rigourous, perceptive, powerful and highly readable. Again, Van Reybrouk combines a historian's clear analytic eye with a journalist's joy at discovering and recounting the experiences of participants in great events. The Indonesian revolution, with all its complexity and horror and excitement and influence, comes alive over these 600 or so pages. This is a magisterial but gripping account of events of urgent importance to us now

Jason Burke

A comprehensive, authoritative, and highly readable history of Indonesia, with a focus on the crisis decade of the 1940s, from the Japanese invasion to liberation from Dutch rule in 1949. Seamlessly interwoven with hundreds upon hundreds of personal testimonies, Van Reybrouck’s narrative is a masterly display of the historian’s craft and a welcome corrective to the fiction that the Dutch in the East Indies were a benign force

J M Coetzee

An astounding feat of both research and storytelling. History at its best

Yuval Harari

History as it should be. Carried by a democracy of ordinary voices, meticulous research, an eye for decisive detail, vivid language and drama, Van Reybrouck forges a fantastic visionary compass to where history was heading at the time: the imagining of a new world order by people of colour

Antjie Krog

David Van Rebyrouck's Revolusi is a major account of one of the most unlikely and astonishing sagas of decolonization. A fully embodied chronicle that combines the skills of a journalist and a historian, the book is a towering achievement. It was the last chance to tell the story of the Indonesian revolution while some of its participants were still alive, and Van Reybrouck seized it

Thomas Meaney

A rare blend of formal daring, intellectual resourcefulness and journalistic fluency, Revolusi briskly ushers Indonesia onto the centre stage of modern history. It reveals, too, decolonisation as the main event of the 20th century — what has shaped our present and will decisively define the future

Pankaj Mishra

A wonderful and important book. David Van Reybrouck has written an authoritative and powerful history of Indonesia that not only reframes the birth of a nation but helps challenge ideas about the end of the European Age of Empire

Peter Frankopan

Relating the story of this place is . . . a mammoth task, requiring a monumental research effort. This is what the Belgian historian David Van Reybrouck has achieved in his superb history, Revolusi

Guardian

A long overdue and utterly compelling narrative history of the birth of Indonesia . . . unfolds over a vast geopolitical canvas and yet never falters . . . It is as intricate as the waterways of the archipelago and yet it hums along, like a steamer on the Java Sea, propelled by the stories of its astonishing cast

Financial Times

A majestic and beautifully written ode to revolution that aims to remind us of the immense significance of this period of history… compellingly written and marvellously translated

Times Literary Supplement

It’s often been said that Indonesia is the world’s largest ‘invisible country’. If that’s true, the revolution beginning in 1945 must surely be the most consequential ‘invisible revolution’ of the last hundred years . . . compelling

History Today