I had touched down in Bali, at the height of the rainy season. The bookshop was on the top floor of a department store in the heart of Kuta, a bustling beach town on the west coast. I made my way between the racks of batik shirts, past wood carvings and painted scenes of rice fields, and entered the bright, book-filled space. At first glance things seemed promising: there were shelves full of books about Indonesia. But once I had skimmed the guidebooks and the language primers I found something strange: here, in a shop targeting tourists in the middle of Bali’s brashest resort, many of the books on sale were academic tomes. There was certainly plenty of history, but most of it came weighted with heavy footnotes, and much of it tackled obscure topics. There were even serious works of sociology and anthropology on offer to the sunburnt shoppers. But when it came to pithy pop history page-turners and lightweight travelogues, there was a distinct deficit. The few non-scholarly books available were mostly either memoirs of life in Bali, or reprints of things penned well over a century ago. Indonesia, it seemed, was something of a desert when it came to history books for general readers.