Brunei Darussalam is often described as “oil-rich” and stable. The people of the small Southeastern Asian Sultanate, however, know that there is far more to their country than its most famous natural resource.

“Remember, Remember…the 8th of December” describes a moment when it was a very different place.

It revisits the time when all Southeast Asia was in turmoil and each country in today’s ASEAN region was a “domino” in a great global theory of the Cold War.

It takes the reader on a journey to the first week of December 1962 – a week that reached its climax with the first shots of the “Brunei Rebellion”.

Based on the memories of people who were there at that time, it presents their lives, the communities they formed and the thoughts that may have occupied the minds of the three principal figures whose decisions on one day determined the future of the tiny nation and its 83,000 inhabitants.

In doing so, a picture is revealed not only of a small country but also of a year that symbolised the Cold War. It shows how 1962 was indeed “The Year of the Tiger” and how its claws dug deep into the lives of ordinary people on every continent.

The book makes use of many techniques - cinematic, televisual, literary and digital - in a story that is part-screenplay and part-documentary, sometimes a narrative, sometimes a commentary, sometimes a poem, sometimes a handwritten diary and, occasionally, even a comic strip.

The result is an unusual but dramatic and intensely human portrait of Brunei, Southeast Asia and life in the turbulent 1960’s.