A big, rich, all-encompassing novel, set in British-ruled Singapore in the years leading up to and including the Japanese invasion in 1941-42. Farrell, who wrote a trio of novels about the British Empire, was at his most ambitious in this book, which ranges all over the colony from the slums to the cricket clubs. It's an exhaustively researched, meticulously evoked portrait of the colonial city in peace and war. (The other two books in Farrell's Empire Trilogy are The Siege of Krishnapur (IDA240) and Troubles (IRE171), also set during violent revolts against British rule.).  (SGP13, $17.95)