Awakenings Combines This Earth of Mankind and Child of All Nations, the first two novels of a quartet by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Minke a Javanese student and aspiring writer, optimistic in his faith in European teaching, is drawn into the mysterious mansion of the Mellema family. Here he finds a new love – the exquisite but fragile Annelies, and a new teacher – the charismatic concubine Nyai Ontosoroh.
Through these extraordinary women he begins to confront his divided world – the ideas and values of the Europeans who have given him literacy, and the political struggle of his own people against their Dutch rulers. Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s epic novels are banned in his own country. Indonesia, but his writing reaches for beyond politics, to achieve a vivid historical picture of the richly varied culture of the Dutch East Indies, and a deep understanding of a people's painful emergence from colonial domination.