In the last years of the twentieth century, longtime journalist Richard Lloyd Parry found himself in the vast island nation of Indonesia, one of the most alluring, mysterious, and violent countries in the world. For thirty-two years, it had been paralyzed by the grip of the dictator and mystic General Suharto, but now the age of Suharto was coming to an end. Would freedom prevail, or merely lawlessness? On the island of Borneo, tribesmen embarked on a savage war of headhunting and cannibalism. Vast jungles burned uncontrollably; money lost its value; there were plane crashes and volcanic eruptions. After the tumultuous fall of Suharto came the vote on independence from Indonesia for the tiny occupied country of East Timor. And it was here, trapped in the besieged compound of the United Nations, that Lloyd Parry reached his own breaking point. A book of hair-raising immediacy and a riveting account of a voyage into the abyss, In the Time of Madness is an accomplishment in the great tradition of Conrad, Orwell, and Ryszard Kapuscinski.
Richard Lloyd Parry is a British author and award-winning foreign correspondent. He was born in northern England in 1969, and educated at Oxford University. Since 1995 has lived in Tokyo, where he is the Asia Editor of 'The Times' of London. He has reported from twenty-seven countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo and Macedonia. In recent years, he has covered the war in Iraq, the crisis in North Korea, political turmoil in Thailand and Burma, and the tsunami and nuclear disasters in Japan. In 2005, he was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year in the UK's What The Papers Say Awards.
He has also contributed to the London Review of Books, Granta and the New York Times Magazine. His books include In the Time of Madness (Grove 2005), an account of the violence in Indonesia in the late 1990s. People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman, published in February 2011, was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.
