Dimensions
154 x 234 x 29mm
Layla Roy has defied the fates.
Despite being born under an inauspicious horoscope, she is raised to be educated and independent by her eccentric grandfather, Dadmoshai. And, by cleverly manipulating the hand forytune has dealt her, she has even found love with Manik Deb- a man betrothed to another.
All were minor miracles in India that Spring of 1943, when young women's lives were pre-determined- if not by the stars, then by centuries of family tradition and social order.
Layla's life as a newly married woman takes her away from home and into the jungles of Assam, where the world's finest tea thrives on plantations run by native labour and British efficiency.
Fascinate by the culture of whiskey-soaked expats who seem faxed by neither earthequakes nor man-eating leopards, she struggles to find her place among the prickly English wives with whom she is expected to socialise, and the peculiar servants she now finds under her charge. But navigating the tea-garden set will hardly be her biggest challenge.
Layla's remote home is not safe from the powerful changes sweeping India on the heels of the Second World War. Their colonial society is at a tipping point, and Layla and Manik find themselves caught in a perilous racial divide that threatens their very lives.
