Kingfishers Catch Fire

Kashmir is a place so fabulously beautiful that no painter can paint it, no poet can render it in verse.

Sophie, a young English woman with two children, goes to set up home there; she finds a tumbleown house in a valley carpeted with flowers below the Himalayas. Settling down to live there quietly, frugally, peacefully and at one with the village community, she is blissfully ignorant of the turmoil that her arrival produces, with the villagers soon in fierce competition for her patronage. Sophie's cook is finally prompted to take action to secure his position and the consequences of his innocent plotting are catastrophic.

'A haunting tale . . . the whole book burns with the beauty and poetry of a matchless landscape, but the human side of it is wry, delicate and true'
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