Tom Turner, an award-winning copywriter and motoring journalist, has released Bali Highs, a compelling memoir that threads together love, loss, and survival against the turbulent backdrop of Indonesia. Available now on Amazon, the book invites readers into a world where the line between fantasy and reality is fragile, and where personal truths emerge from chaos.
Unlike conventional tales of island escapism, Bali Highs is a brutally honest, deeply reflective work born from lived experience. In the early 2000s, Turner embarked on a family holiday to Bali that was meant to provide rest and rejuvenation. Instead, he became an unwitting observer of Indonesia’s transmigration crisis — a state programme that displaced communities and sparked violence across nearby islands. As tourists revelled in Bali’s tropical beauty, Turner found himself face-to-face with the human cost of social engineering and religious conflict.
At the heart of the narrative is an encounter with a 19-year-old Javanese woman — a meeting that unfolds into a complex emotional journey spanning continents. What began as a fleeting connection becomes an enduring story of longing and moral reckoning, reignited years later by a phone call from Europe. Turner’s writing is both lyrical and unsparing, capturing the tension between compassion and guilt with rare honesty.
Bali Highs confronts the uneasy truths of travel, exploring themes of complicity, desire, and the illusions people chase in search of escape. Turner’s background as an award-winning copywriter infuses the prose with precision and power, painting Southeast Asia in all its sensual beauty and unsettling contradictions.
With an accomplished career that includes D&AD Gold and Silver awards and a motoring website boasting over 1.6 million subscribers, Turner brings the same observational sharpness to this memoir — but this time, the subject is himself. The result is a work that is as personal as it is political, as intimate as it is global.
Ideal for readers aged 30–60 who appreciate gritty, introspective travel literature, Bali Highs will resonate with fans of Alex Garland’s The Beach and John Burdett’s crime novels set in Bangkok. Turner’s debut memoir is not just about travel — it’s about the places that change us, and the truths we can’t escape, no matter how far we go.
Availability:
Tom Turner’s Bali Highs is now available worldwide on Amazon in paperback and eBook formats.
For more information, visit: www.thethomasturner.com