Chinnery's Hotel

‘Amongst the best works of fiction that I have read in many years’—Khushwant Singh ‘Likely to bring a tear to the most cynical eye’—Times Literary Supplement After spending nearly four uneasy decades in her ancestral England and accompanied by her dead sister’s daughter Camilla, Grace returns to the cantonment township of Mhow, where she had spent a much-cosseted childhood and youth in her parents’ establishment called Chinnery’s Hotel. The bleak post-War life in London had fed Grace’s nostalgia for her childhood home. However, she discovers that Mhow has not remained immune to the profound and often corrosive changes that a new nation in the making has undergone. Chinnery’s Hotel has changed, too, and in its garden gone to seed history and rumour continue to intersect long after its guests have checked out, never to return. Through a subtle interweaving of past and present, the overlapping narrative of Chinnery’s Hotel traverses two continents and three historical periods. Skilfully crafted, it gives a vivid picture of the British Raj and the predicament of Anglo-Indians. ‘It belongs to the tradition established by E.M. Forster who would surely have given it his warm approval’—Frank Kermode ‘Birjépatil’s loving, ironic gaze poignantly conjures up what Milton calls “a long day’s dying to augment our pain”’—Stephen Greenblatt