Monsoon Summer
A Novel
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3.9 • 9 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This ambitious historical novel from Gregson (East of the Sun) follows British nurse and aspiring midwife Kit Smallwood, who marries an Oxford-educated doctor, Anto Thekkeden, and moves with him to India shortly after the country gains independence in 1947. Haunted by the death of a baby on her watch, Kit is reluctant to pursue her midwife certificate. Nonetheless, she promises family friend Daisy Barker that she'll help get Daisy's favorite charity, a clinic for poor women called the Moonstone, up and running. Kit and Anto soon realize that their idealistic plans will be challenged by Anto's wealthy high-caste family. Kit is especially disparaged by Anto's mother, Kunjamma, who hoped that after his long absence abroad he would marry a local girl of similar status. Kit learns that the Moonstone is in dire need of staff and supplies, and begins to dedicate more and more of her time to the increasingly risky job, much to her new family's chagrin. Strong characters make Gregson's novel a powerhouse. The need to preserve honor and avoid shame drives the Thekkeden clan and leads them to keep secrets from one another that snowball. Kit's desire to help people eventually gets her into trouble with both her family and the law. Gregson does a fantastic job of pitting conventional ways against progressive thinking without demonizing either side. This story covers a lot of ground family vs. the other, new vs. old, science vs. superstition and only falters when bending the plot a certain way at convenient points. This small flaw doesn't detract from a powerful and memorable novel.
