| Himalayan Cure a novel |
Synopsis
Unadventurous, mildly racist, forty-something Sonia has devoted her life to her husband and children but he has been playing away and sues for a divorce. Almost as bad is that the ambitious children have gone off to start their own lives, and they blame their mother for the rift. Her life has disintegrated. Sonia’s life is over before she has experienced any real challenges, or appreciation. Her GP prescribes a trip to an unspoilt village in the Gangetic plains of East Nepal: she’ll flee the drizzle of late autumn in England and arrive in the deliciously luxuriant post-monsoon ‘spring,’ but there will be no electricity, water has to be pulled from the earth with a handpump and the loo is a hole in the ground. The GP knows the people who will host Sonia and is sure she will enter a truly caring community where it is possible to survive and even love life without retail therapy and with few material possessions.
Sonia stays with forty-something illiterate undemonstrative Guliya, mother of many children, who is still in love with her husband. The two women seem different at first. Under the guidance of Guliya and dashing Mr Rekraj Dickshit, Sonia gets involved with the small community. The community is in flux, and the castes are at odds with each other – as ever. Slavery had been abolished only a couple of years before and the villagers are still struggling to find roles that will ensure a full belly throughout the year. Rekraj sees ill-omens, there are tremors and he understands that Lord Shiva is angry. Guliya’s teenage daughter, Kamala (nicknamed Moti), takes Sonia on a small pilgrimage into the mountains and the English woman is moved by the Nepali’s faith and spirituality. The idyll is shattered though and the trip turns into more of an adventure than Sonia bargained for.
The 75,000-word narrative is told from the points of view of Sonia and also of the Nepalis she lives with. We see the idiocy and pointless anxiety of Westerners as described by the Nepalis, contrasted with the Brit’s patronising view of the primitiveness and lack of sophistication in the villagers. The imagery and detail of the lives of people of different castes comes from the author’s six-year stay in Nepal. It is a light but entertaining and life-affirming read and forms a fictional sequel to A Glimpse of Eternal Snows.
“The characters are delightful, especially the way the Nepalese see things so, so differently . . .” Sally Radnor of Cambridge Writers.
Unique Selling Points
• Author has an intimate knowledge of the community she writes about having lived in Nepal for six years
and having worked as a doctor there
• The text is set in a region where slavery was only outlawed few years before
• The story is set against the towering backdrop of the Himalayas with its wealth of wonderful wildlife
• Novel idea of a fictional sequel to a successful memoir |
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| Himalayan Kidnap an eco-adventure for 8 – 12 year olds |
Synopsis
This fictional tale opens in Kathmandu when 16-year-old Alex and his twelve-year-old brother, James, receive a crackly phone-call from Maoist terrorists who have kidnapped the boys' parents. Alex and James go to deliver the ransom money but not only fail to secure their parents’ release but they themselves are captured, tied up and left to be eaten alive. They manage to escape and pursue the kidnappers through the crisp lowland forests of the wild west of Nepal. Here they meet tigers, elephant, rhino, otters and river dolphins and so descriptions of exotic animals and their antics are interwoven with the story. The boys follow the Maoists into the mountains. Finally, after a brush with a king cobra, bears and crossing two high passes and some scary bridges, they catch up with the kidnapers and their parents – and rescue them.
The narrative of this book is very firmly set amongst the sights, smells and sounds of this world and yet there are mentions of Nepali myths and strange beliefs including the magical properties of jackal horns and the precautions that villagers take to keep headless ghosts out of their houses. There are also hints at some of Nepal’s social and ecological problems. There is impatience amongst many children with happy-ever-after tales. This one ends in disaster, or the faint-hearted may choose the gentler ending. The typescript runs to about 47,000 words.
The readership will be children over the age of eight, and the eco-adventure series of which this is the first, will be of special interest to parents who have travelled adventurously before children or are planning to travel with the family. I see a gap in the market in reality fiction. These are horizon-broadening books showing that life is possible without television and computer games.
“The Editorial Director [of Top That!] loves the stories”
Unique Selling Points
• Author has an intimate knowledge of the community she writes about having lived in Nepal for six years
and having worked as a doctor there
• The text is set in a region where slavery was only outlawed few years before
• The story is set against the towering backdrop of the Himalayas with its wealth of wonderful wildlife
• Novel idea of a fictional sequel to a successful memoir
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| The Magic Middle Finger an eco-adventure for 8 – 12 year olds |
Synopsis
The story opens with sixteen-year-old Alex and his twelve-year-old brother, James, flying into Antananarivo, Madagascar. They expect to catch up with their parents who are zoologists studying rare wildlife in the north of the Great Red Island, but a stranger meets them at the airport. He escorts them on the rough 800km, three-day journey by bus to the Ankarana Massif. On the way they meet an English modern-day pirate and an eccentric princess who warns them of The People Who Walk at Night and other supernatural hazards. This is the first of various references to traditional beliefs in the Ancestors and evil spirits.
The boys manage to find their parents who have set up a base in virgin forest that is walled in by spiky limestone. The water supply is a subterranean river. They start to help with the zoological fieldwork, but odd things start to happen and radio-tagged endangered animals disappear. The family realise that they are not alone in the massif, and they don’t know who they can trust.
Romping through a series of adventures the boys manage to foil a gang who have been making money from capturing endangered animals and selling them to exotic pet ‘collectors’ overseas. The narrative is grounded in believable eco-crime. There are also hints at Madagascar’s economic and ecological problems in amongst engaging descriptions of rare wildlife.
Unique Selling Points
• Realism - an exotic antidote to spells and wizards, although there are references to the villagers’ beliefs in spirits of the Ancestors
• The author did some of the early exploration of the Ankarana Massif which contributed to
its reserve status and protection being upgraded
• The tale is set in a region where poverty, deadly diseases and tribal prejudice are facts of everyday life
• The story is set in a reserve with some of the highest densities of primates anywhere in the world.
It is based on the author’s own zoological researches; she writes authoritatively but entertainingly about endangered species
• Dervla Murphy described the author’s first book as “the finest travel book thus far written about Madagascar”
• An eco-adventure surely captures the ‘green’ mood in the country at present |
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