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LEILA S. CHUDORI spent six years researching this groundbreaking novel, interviewing exiles and their families in Paris and Jakarta, basing her characters on these real individuals, trapped in the tides of history. The novel’s central character, Dimas Suryo, abroad in 1965 and unable to return to Indonesia after Suharto’s rise to power, winds up in Paris, where he helps found a restaurant, based on the real Restaurant Indonesia, a place to join and celebrate their longed-for home culture through food, dance, and song, while suffering a lifetime of homelessness away from Indonesia. In another narrative strand of the novel, Lintang Utara, Suryo’s daughter with a Frenchwoman, arrives in Jakarta in 1998 for her thesis in film studies just as the student protests that bring down Suharto get underway. Father and daughter each become central characters in the history of Indonesia’s tragic 20th century, marking the rise and fall of a brutal dictatorship.