Book Title: The Fortune Teller of Kathmandu
Series: Echoes of Empire
Author: Ann Bennett
Publication Date: 31st October 2023
Publisher: Andaman Press
Page Length: 356
Genre: Historical Fiction / Historical Romance / Women’s adventure and romance
A sweeping wartime tale of secrets and love, mystery and redemption, moving from the snow-capped Himalayas to the steamy heat of battle in the Burmese jungle.
Perfect for fans of Dinah Jeffries, Victoria Hislop and Rosie Thomas.
Hampshire, UK, 2015. When Chloe Harper’s beloved grandmother, Lena dies, a stranger hands her Lena’s wartime diary. Chloe sets out to uncover deep family secrets that Lena guarded to her grave.
Darjeeling, India, 1943, Lena Chatterjee leaves the confines of a strict boarding school to work as assistant to Lieutenant George Harper, an officer in the British Indian Army. She accompanies him to Nepal and deep into the Himalayas to recruit Gurkhas for the failing Burma Campaign. There, she discovers that Lieutenant Harper has a secret, which she vows never to reveal.
In Kathmandu, the prophesy of a mysterious fortune teller sets Lena on a dangerous course. She joins the Women’s Auxiliary Service Burma (the Wasbies), risking her life to follow the man she loves to the front line. What happens there changes the course of her life.
On her quest to uncover her grandmother’s hidden past, Chloe herself encounters mystery and romance. Helped by young Nepalese tour guide, Kiran Rai, she finds history repeating itself when she is swept up in events that spiral out of control...
#HistoricalFiction #HistoricalRomance #WomensAdventure #BlogTour #TheCoffeePotBookClub
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Universal Buy Link: https://mybook.to/tftok
Excerpt
Darjeeling, 1943
Lena had come to loathe Monday mornings, when it was her job to take the senior girls’ English class. Whatever she did to try to interest them in the syllabus she’d been instructed to teach, their eyes would quickly glaze over, and they would begin to chatter amongst themselves, giggle, pass notes, and sometimes even throw things across the classroom. For the rest of the week, Lena oversaw the junior girls. She had far less trouble with them. They were more malleable, more compliant, better behaved all round than the older girls. But despite her own love of English literature, she could never seem to ignite any spark of enthusiasm in these girls.
That day, they were studying Jane Eyre and were going round the class, reading a passage at a time out loud. The girls’ English was patchy, some were better than others, but all of them had the tendency to slip into that sing-song accent that marked them out as Eurasians that the school was so desperate to stamp out of them.
These girls were the illegitimate daughters of British officers and officials of the Raj. The result of illicit liaisons with native Indian women, they had been packed off to the establishment at a very early age. The hope was that here in Darjeeling, this sleepy, remote hill station, far away from the seat of Empire, they could be discreetly forgotten, while their Indian heritage was gradually educated away. Each and every one of them was well aware of the shame of their existence and that they were here at St Catherine’s to try to remove the Indianness from them, although their antecedents would always be obvious from the colour of their skin.
Lena herself had been one of those girls. She’d been brought here by her reluctant mother, Sita, at the age of three, and had entered the ‘orphanage’. She’d been here ever since. When she’d been old enough, she’d started lessons with the other little ones in the schoolroom. They were taught English, rudimentary arithmetic, geography, history and a smattering of science. The teaching was seldom very good, because they were mainly taught by ex-pupils like Lena herself, who had never left the place and had certainly never been trained to teach. It didn’t seem to trouble the school authorities or the parents that the education was far from first-class. Far more important than the main subjects were the lessons on deportment and English habits and culture that formed a large part of the curriculum. More usefully, they were also taught shorthand and typing to equip them for the outside world.
Lena’s attention wandered, and she stared out of the window, while a girl on the front row stumbled ineptly through a passage about Jane Eyre’s arrival at Thornfield Hall. Whenever Lena was bored or frustrated, all she needed to do was feast her eyes on the distant vista of Kanchenjunga. It towered over the neat lines of the tea gardens around Darjeeling, the coloured roofs of the buildings scattered around the nearby hills, the blue-tinged Himalayan foothills, those mystical mountains, whose jagged series of snow-covered peaks seemed to change minute by minute with the angle of the sun, like a living kaleidoscope. The sight of those far-off mountains both chilled and thrilled her. They represented mystery and adventure, wonder and beauty, and the fact that the world and life in general contained infinite possibilities. But they also represented the harshest environment on earth and all the dangers that went along with that.
The view of those incredible peaks had been ever-present in her life for as long as Lena could remember. Wherever you went in Darjeeling, apart from when the monsoon shrouded it in mist, it was there. Glimpsed from between tall buildings at the end of an alleyway, from the narrow streets of the Indian town, from the botanical gardens, the railway station. And just the sight of it lifted Lena’s spirits.
Ann Bennett is a British author of historical fiction. She was born in Pury End, a small village in Northamptonshire, UK and now lives in Surrey.
Her first book, Bamboo Heart: A Daughter's Quest, was inspired by researching her father’s experience as a prisoner of war on the Thai-Burma Railway. Bamboo Island: The Planter's Wife, A Daughter's Promise and Bamboo Road:The Homecoming, The Tea Panter's Club and The Amulet are also about the war in South East Asia, which together with The Fortune Teller of Kathmandu make up the Echoes of Empire Collection.
Ann is also author of The Runaway Sisters, bestselling The Orphan House, The Forgotten Children and The Child Without a Home, published by Bookouture.
The Lake Pavilion, The Lake Palace, both set in British India in the 1930s and WW2, and The Lake Pagoda and The Lake Villa, set in French Indochina during WW2, make up The Oriental Lake Collection.
Ann is married with three grown-up sons and a granddaughter and works as a lawyer. For more details please visit www.annbennettauthor.com.
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Amazon Author Page UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B00D21SJ7A
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1951323.Ann_Bennett
Thanks so much for featuring Ann Bennett today.
ReplyDeleteTake care,
Cathie xo
The Coffee Pot Book Club
You are welcome Cathie!
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