Anthony Burgess, The Malayan Trilogy (1956–59). Burgess taught at Malay College Kuala Kangsar in the early 1950s, and the experience formed the basis for Time for a Tiger — the first novel of his Malayan trilogy and one of the best evocations of late-colonial Malaysia in English. Read it before visiting Kuala Kangsar.
Tash Aw, The Harmony Silk Factory (2005). Aw's first novel is set in 1940s Kinta Valley and centres on a Perak tin and textile magnate; the landscape — limestone karst, rubber estates, the long shadow of the Japanese occupation — is unmistakably this state. A Booker-longlisted novel that gives a strong sense of the place.
Anthony Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God (1987). The first volume of Burgess's autobiography includes his Kuala Kangsar chapters, with portraits of the Malay College that are as fond and acerbic as the novel.
Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (1968). Not specifically about Perak, but contains the best short account in English of the late 19th-century tin rush that turned the Kinta Valley into one of the most economically important places on earth — and made Ipoh and Taiping into the cities they are today.
Jonathan Kennedy, Pathogenesis (2023). Recent global history of disease that includes a vivid passage on the plasmodium-driven economy of British Malaya, with detail on the malarial Kinta Valley and the labour conditions of the tin mines.