Born into poverty and sold into prostitution at the age of eleven, Linny Gow uses her wits to reinvent herself as a proper Victorian lady and joins the "fishing fleet" of poor young women of good birth who sail for India to find husbands.

In this “candid, perceptive and intelligent” trio of novellas, the acclaimed travel writer presents tales of Westerners transformed by sojourns in India (Independent, UK).
These three intertwined novellas by the author of The Great Railway Bazaar capture the tumult, ambition, hardship, and serenity that mark today’s India. Theroux’s Westerners risk venturing far beyond...

Down market lanes crammed with too many people, dogs, and rickshaws, past stalls that smell of cardamom and sizzling oil, below a smoggy sky that doesn't let through a single blade of sunlight, and all the way at the end of the Purple metro line lies a jumble of tin-roofed homes where nine-year-old Jai lives with his family. From his doorway, he can spot the glittering lights of the city's fancy high-rises, and though his mother works as a maid in...

Simla 1922. The summer capital of the British Raj is fizzing with the energy of the jazz age.

Commander Joe Sandilands is looking forward to spending a month here in the cool of the Himalayan hills as the guest of Sir George Jardine, the Governor of Bengal. When Joe's travelling companion, a Russian opera singer, is shot dead at his side in the back of the Governor's car on the road up to Simla, he finds himself plunged into a murder

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"India, 1922: Perveen Mistry is the only female lawyer in Bombay, a city where child mortality is high, birth control is unavailable and very few women have ever seen a doctor. Perveen is attending a lavish fundraiser for a new women's hospital specializing in maternal health issues when she witnesses an accident. The grandson of an influential Gujarati businessman catches fire--but a servant, his young ayah, Sunanda, rushes to save him, selflessly...

"Sara is studying at a prestigious British university and seeks a reprise from her loneliness by practicing the traditional craft she learned in India when she was young: pottery. She recalls her childhood, the lost dog, Chinna, who brings a community together, and the life of her revered pottery teacher, Elango, a Hindu who faced prejudice after falling in love with a Muslim woman. Switching with ease between Sara's diary entries and Elango's life...

A rice farmer-turned-poacher whose brother has been killed and a documentary filmmaker dedicated to preserving wildlife find their views challenged by the violence of a brutal escaped elephant.

Joe Sandilands becomes caught up in a murder plot with reverberations in the past when a Pathan prince is killed, hostages are seized, and Joe is given one week to identify the killer before the frontier is engulfed in violence.

Hall's irresistible protagonist Vish Puri is an international favorite in a series that "splendidly evokes the color and bustle of Delhi and the tang of contemporary India" ("The Seattle Times"). The spectacularly mustachioed sleuth finds himself facing down his greatest fears in an explosive case involving the Indian and Pakistani mafias.

When a tsunami rages through their coastal town in India, 17-year-old Ahalya Ghai and her 15-year-old sister Sita are left orphaned and homeless. As they struggle to reach the safe haven of the convent where they attend school, they are abducted by human traffickers and thrust into a hidden world of sexual violence and illicit commerce, where the most valuable prize is the innocence of a child. Halfway across the world, in Washington, D.C., attorney...