In brief: It looked disappointingly as though there was going to be no offer of the delicious-looking walnut cake. Tea yes, but cake no. Viva Holloway had made herself look as responsible as possible prior to the interview to encourage her prospective customers to trust their children to her care. Although they weren’t really children, more like young adults. Viva needed to fund her return to India, and offering her services as a chaperone on the Tilbury to Bombay run seemed to her an eminently sensible idea. It was imperative, however, that Viva hold her nerve. She mentally crossed her fingers, as she confidently affirmed that she knew Bombay well, when she had in fact last been there when she was ten years old – before the series of events that had changed her life.

As the day drew to a close, Viva was engaged to escort three young people to India. Rose, who was to be married to a captain in the Third Cavalry, her bridesmaid Tor, and a rather mysterious boy of sixteen, Guy, who had had to leave his school at short notice, and whose parents were in Assam. Viva’s fees, along with her savings, should be just about enough.

Tor couldn’t wait to go. This was her chance, her moment to escape from her mother. They had had some awful rows, and now Tor simply hated her. There had just been one too many sly comments about her weight. She would go with her best friend Rose halfway round the world, and there she would find happiness. She was to stay with a distant cousin of her mother’s, Ci Ci Mallinson, who was sure to introduce her into just the right circles, and there she would meet the man who would save her. Simple as that!

Viva had found it easie just to say that her parents had been killed years ago in a car accident in India. She never needed to mention her sister Josie, because no one ever asked. It was easier than the truth. For a long time she’d felt that going back to India would just drag it all up again, but somehow, now she had purpose in her life, going back seemed the thing to do. Her job with the novelist Nancy Driver was so much more rewarding than the other jobs she’d drifted through, and it had given her a career to aim for – she knew she wanted to be a writer. And maybe the trunk that had once belonged to her parents, and was now in the care of some old lady in Simla, would be as full of lovely revealing things as it was in her dreams.

The night before sailing, Rose nearly called the whole thing off. She didn’t really know Jack, did she? And her father had been so ill, and he was so thin now. And she’d probably never see her pony again, or the dogs, or even her parents. It was such a long way into the unknown. But at least Tor would be there. They’d been best friends for ever, and would face the world together . . . at least until the wedding.

But they were none of them prepared for India; Viva fighting her way into her past, Rose and Tor into the future. All of them, along with disturbed Guy, try to make their way in an India just coming to the boil after so many years of empire.

About the author

Julia Gregson has worked in women’s magazines in the UK, US and the Far East. She has written one previous novel, The Water Horse, and has had several serials and short stories published and read on the radio. She lives in Wales with her husband and daughter.

The story behind East of the Sun

“East of the Sun began when I was five years old and fell madly in love for the first time. Her name was Kate Smith Pearse. She was sixty years old and had recently returned ‘home’ to England after years in India. I adored everything about her: the battered tweeds, the honking laugh, her pouncing style of conversation. ‘Now look here, what have you been up to?’ Stories of tiger hunts, snakes under the bath, campfires in the foothills of the Himalayas.

“On the face of it, she was a classic Memsahib – ‘The Master’s woman.’ At eighteen, she’d gone to India as part of ‘the Fishing Fleet’, as girls who went East in search of husbands were known.

“Years later, I came across tape recordings she’d made on her life there. I was stunned. The same voice, talking about elephant hunts and sunsets, but also a revelation. India had given her so much, but had taken in equal measure. She’d lost her adopted son when he’d been sent to an English boarding school. She had lost her career – in India, the Masters’ women didn’t work. It was considered infra dig.

“She showed no self-pity about this. But I feel angry on her behalf, particularly when I hear, read or see yet another representation of the Memsahibs as narrow-minded, gin-swilling snobs. Some were frightful. Most were not. Other women of the Raj spoke to me of botched births in remote areas, of burying young children, of flies and heat and snakes, of runaway or workaholic husbands, of terrible homesickness.

“East of the Sun is my raised glass to these women: to their friendships, to the men they loved, to the work they did, and the price they paid for loving India.”

Julia Gregson, Monmouthshire, 2008

For discussion

• How does the author create the strong sense of England we feel at the start of the novel?
• The theme of being an outsider is central to the novel. How so?
• ‘If he had a soul . . . it had been, in a hundred thousand ways, forged so differently from hers.’ Is such difference more appealing than similarity?
• How does the author convey the sheer size of India?
• What does being ‘a soldier’s daughter’ mean?
• Are all the characters struggling for a freedom of sorts?
• ‘For the first time in your life, you’re not thinking about yourself.’ Does India do this to all our characters?
• ‘We do not see things as they are, but as we are.’ Is this true, do you think?
• ‘And the truth shall make you whole.’ Does it?
• The author sometimes sees women as birds, imagery-wise. Is it all the women in the novel? If not, why not?
• ‘Don’t you think most people make their parents up?’ Do they?
• How important is ‘home’?

Suggested further reading

Staying On by Paul Scott
Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner
The Far Pavilions by M. M. Kaye
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy