The Wonder House - Hardcover

Justine Hardy has spent much of the past fifteen years based in India as a writer, journalist and documentary maker. She has worked and written for papers ranging from the Australian via the Indian Express to the Financial Times. Her first book, The Ochre Border was about the reopening of the Tibetan frontierlands. Her second, Scoop wallah: Life on a Delhi Daily was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Award. Other books include Goat:A Story of Kashmir and Notting Hill and Bollywood Boy, about the high-octane world of the Hindi film industry. The Wonder House is her first novel.

The rising fears and fading aspirations of a Muslim family in Indian-controlled Kashmir come in for observation by outsiders in Hardy's fiction debut, set in 1999–2000—just after the Kargil War and Musharraf's subsequent coup. Gracie Singh is an 80-year-old Englishwoman who has lived in Kashmir since the death of her Indian husband more than 20 years ago. She drifts about in a nostalgic, alcoholic daze on her houseboat, which everyone calls the Wonder House, tended by Lila, a niece of Gracie's landlord and decades-long friend, Masood Abdullah, and by Lila's mother, the mysteriously mute Suriya. The Abdullahs live in fear of both a brutal Indian military and the radicalization of their religion; when Masood's nephew Irfan leaves home to join a militant group, he puts the family in grave danger, a situation exacerbated by the arrival of English journalist Hal Copeman. Hardy chronicled a rising 1990s New Delhi and the always fabulous Bollywood in a pair of nonfiction titles. In her novel she uses too light a touch with history (as pushed through an acerbic Gracie and the Abdullah family exigencies) and too heavy a hand with message (having Hal, for instance, apologize for journalism's limitations). But her scenes are rich with sensual detail, making for vivid impressions. (Apr.)
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