Coronation Talkies (Susan Kurosawa, Viking, $29.95 tpb, ISBN 067004279X, October) ****

I am usually wary of books set in India; too many of them tend to exoticise people, places and culture at the expense of truth. I was relieved to find that Susan Kurosawa does not fall into this trap in this, her first novel. Set in the tiny hill-station of Chalaili in the last days of the Raj in India, Coronation Talkies is an engrossing and touchingly funny read. The lovable and resourceful Mrs Banerjee has left behind a difficult past in Bombay to set up a cinema featuring her Hollywood heroes. Lydia, the very English wife of the meteorological officer William Rushmore, has just arrived in India and now faces the fragile yet tight-knit British community of this remote colonial outpost. Through these two very different women, we are introduced not only to a politically changing world but also to the effects of these changes on personal relationships. Kurosawa's many years as a travel journalist certainly inform her fiction writing. Characters and places are vividly created and her eye for detail is impeccable, but this never impedes the progress and flow of the narrative. I honestly have not enjoyed a novel this much for some time.

Kabita Dhara is fiction buyer at Dymocks Melbourne

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2004, Thorpe-Bowker