East of the Sun: A Novel

Julia Gregson

Jun 2009 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

From award winner Julia Gregson, author of Jasmine Nights, this sweeping international bestseller brilliantly captures the lives of three young women on their way to a new life in India during the 1920s.

As the Kaisar-I-Hind weighs anchor for Bombay in the autumn of 1928, its passengers ponder their fate in a distant land. They are part of the “Fishing Fleet”—the name given to the legions of English women who sail to India each year in search of husbands, heedless of the life that awaits them. The inexperienced chaperone Viva Holloway has been entrusted to watch over three unsettling charges. There’s Rose, as beautiful as she is naïve, who plans to marry a cavalry officer she has met a mere handful of times. Her bridesmaid, Victoria, is hell-bent on losing her virginity en route before finding a husband of her own. And shadowing them all is the malevolent presence of a disturbed schoolboy named Guy Glover.

From the parties of the wealthy Bombay socialites to the poverty of Tamarind Street, from the sooty streets of London to the genteel conversation of the Bombay Yacht Club, East of the Sun takes us back to a world we hardly understand but yearn to know. This is a book that has it all: glorious detail, fascinating characters, and masterful storytelling.

Ratings and reviews

Very slow paced with no conclusion to sink the teeth into, this is a story of three women - one who has no other wish then to be married, one whose intentions do not become clear until later (by which point I had lost interest) and one who is married and has little interest in the marriage itself... and yet the author does bring to life the tensions, heat and spices of 1920's India.

Very interesting novel

About the author

Julia Gregson has worked as a journalist and foreign correspondent in the UK, Australia, and the US. 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. Her short stories have been published in collections and magazines and read on the radio. She lives in Monmouthshire, Wales.