*For those who live outside the UK: Richard and Judy are Britain’s TV equivalent to Oprah Winfrey. This is a novel you will either love or, whilst not hate, will wonder what places it above others of its ilk. (Did the publishers ask the author to ‘beef’ up the narrative?) To me, it carries on long after the original concept has run out of steam. Minor characters were total stereotypes and many of the plot-lines went nowhere, such as Guy’s breakdown and Viva’s abduction and rescue. Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet comes to mind but there are many more. I’ve read it all before and better elsewhere. The main characters act exactly as you’d expect. Then again, I don’t feel it says anything startlingly new about the British presence in India or the ‘passage’ to India. Suffice to say life in India is not what any of them expected, and all emerge from the experience better and wiser people.

We follow them on their sea-voyage and the people they meet and their subsequent experiences. The captivating million copy bestseller of three young women in search of freedom and love in 1920s India. Another of Viva’s charges is Guy, a troubled young man. Her best friend and bridesmaid, Victoria (known as Tor) is desperate to escape the crushing influence of her mother and live an independent life. It invoked boredom, annoyance, and frustration pretty quickly. She is the author of East of the Sun, which was a major bestseller in the UK and won the Romantic Novel of the Year Prize and the Le Prince Maurice Prize there, and Monsoon Summer. Rose, a pretty but naïve girl, is about to be married to a young soldier she barely knows. Julia Gregsons East of the Sun was an emotional read. Julia Gregson has worked as a journalist and foreign correspondent in the UK, Australia, and the US. Viva is hired to chaperone Rose and Victoria but has personal reasons for wanting to return to the country of her birth which she only vaguely remembers. Rushed into paperback after having been chosen as one of Richard and Judy’s Summer Reads*, this novel tells the story of three girls on their way to India in 1928.

East of the sun by julia gregson