10 great reads for summer

You’ll need a good sunlounger book – what will you choose?

The Bureau Of Second Chances

Sheena Kalayil, Polygon, £8.99

LOVERS of Deborah Moggach’s Best Exotic Marigold Hotel are in for a fresh new treat.

Sheena Kalayil’s The Bureau of Second Chances – set in her parents’ native Kerala, India – is a captivating tale of love and loss and new beginnings in middle age.

At 46, the mum-of-two and University of Manchester lecturer who studied engineering, admits it’s been a long time coming.

And the novel may never have happened had it not been for a spell in Scotland’s capital.

Sheena explains: “My husband had once taken me on a surprise holiday to Edinburgh and I fell in love with the city. When we first married we were living in Spain but he wanted to do a PhD in literature in the UK. I said I would go back if we went to Edinburgh.”

She adds with a smile: “It was in Edinburgh that I started writing in earnest.”

The couple moved to Leith and went on to have two daughters, now 11 and 13. Sheena remembers: “Both my children were born at the city’s Royal Infirmary. When my first daughter was born the midwife was saying ‘we need more Scottish babies’.

“I pointed out that I was Indian and my husband English, but she said a baby born there would always be Scottish. It is an indelible connection. We always return to Edinburgh; we were there at Easter.”

And it was this sense of community that helped Sheena to develop the confidence she needed to become an author, penning a short story which was shortlisted at the Leith Festival.

“I saw that this was something I could never give up,” she says.

But with a full-time job and a family to care for, she just writes whenever and wherever she gets the chance.

“We have one bathroom at home and two girls who take forever in there,” she laughs. “Rather than moaning at them I write while I’m waiting to get into the bathroom.”

And as she does she is transported from her Manchester semi to the shores of the Arabian Sea and a lonely beach house.

It is to here that her main protagonist, recently widowed London optician and Keralite Thomas Imbalil, has returned to face a solitary retirement.

What unfolds is a tantalising tale with twists and turns and a conclusion that few would guess.

The Bureau of Second Chances is out now.