Monsoon Summer

By the award-winning author of East of the Sun, a powerful and memorable novel (Publishers Weekly) about the forbidden love between a young Indian doctor and an English midwife.Oxfordshire, 1947. Kit Smallwood, hiding a painful secret and exhausted from nursing soldiers during the Second World War, escapes to Wickam Farm where her friend is setting up a charity sending midwives to the Moonstone Home in South India. Then Kit meets Anto, an Indian doctor finishing his medical training at Oxford. But Kits light-skinned mother is in fact Anglo-Indian with secrets of her own, and Anto is everything she does not want for her daughter. Despite the threat of estrangement, Kit is excited for the future, hungry for adventure, and deeply in love. She and Anto secretly marry and set off for South Indiawhere Kit plans to run the maternity hospital shes helped from afar. But Kits life in India does not turn out as she imagined. Antos large, traditional family wanted him to marry an Indian bride and find it hard to accept Kit. As their relationship begins to fray, Kits job becomes fraught with tension as they both face a newly independent India, where riots have left millions dead and there is deep-rooted suspicion of the English. In a rapidly changing world, Kits naivet is to land her in a frightening and dangerous situation... Based on true accounts of European midwives in India, Monsoon Summer is a powerful story of secrets, the nature of home, the comforts and frustrations of family, and how far well go to be with those we love.