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 Kit’s 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 India—where Kit plans to run the maternity hospital she’s helped from afar.
But Kit’s life in India does not turn out as she imagined. Anto’s large, traditional family wanted him to marry an Indian bride and find it hard to accept Kit. As their relationship begins to fray, Kit’s 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, Kit’s naiveté 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 we’ll go to be with those we love.
“Dazzling . . . Gregson, as always, writes with grace and authority in this fresh and affecting tale that successfully blends questions of love, home, colonialism and race with suspense and secrets. Like E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, Monsoon Summer offers a thoughtful storyline, a wealth of well-drawn characters, an enlightening view of history and intelligent entertainment, as Gregson again displays excellence on every page of her work.”
“Readers looking beyond American and British borders will relish the flavors of Gregson’s post-war India as they enjoy the story of a young woman coming to grips with a new marriage, a new life and a new land. [Gregson] completely understands the beauty and harshness of India, its land, culture and history. She fearlessly takes on the prejudices that existed during this era to paint an accurate portrait: an intimate glimpse into the British and Indian psyche.”
“Engaging . . . [an] overall allure of escapism, a plethora of agreeable characters, and a satisfying, all’s-well-that-ends-well conclusion.”
“Julia Gregson's newest novel continues the success of her previous novel, East of the Sun, which was published in 26 countries, optioned by the BBC and won the Romantic Novel of the Year Prize as well as the Le Prince Maurice Prize.”
