With all the cold and rainy weather we’ve been having lately here in Georgia (yes, I know, it doesn’t compare to the subzero temperatures my family is experiencing back home in Canada, but it’s still miserable!), opening the pages of Julia Gregson’s novel East of the Sun was akin to lighting a roaring fire in a cold, damp room. I could almost soak up the heat from the book’s locale just by reading its pages. And isn’t the cover gorgeous?

In 1920s England, Viva is an aspiring writer who longs to return to India, where she lived until her parents were tragically and mysteriously killed when she was a young girl. To afford the cost of the trip, she hires herself out as chaperone to two young women, Rose, who is traveling to India to marry her soldier fiance, and her bridesmaid and best friend, Victoria, who is hoping to escape the confines of her mother’s control and find herself a husband among the eligible British living in Bombay. Viva also takes on 16-year-old Guy Glover, a troubled and strange boy who is being sent back to his parents after being expelled from yet another British boarding school. Once on board the ship that will take them to India, the three women share their hopes and dreams for what they believe India harbors for each of them and experience a freedom unknown to them back in England. When they actually arrive in Bombay, the realities of their new existence, in the last days of a colonial empire, are much different than they anticipated.

The book’s strengths lie in the parts devoted Viva, Tor and Rose and the ways in which they forge new lives for themselves. What is less successful is the character of Guy Glover, who I felt had no other role except to add unnecessary conflict and problems – which he does, in spades. But it was a little too much to add into what, at over 600 pages, is already a book with a lot going on: the changing role of women in society and the class disparity both in England and in India to name but two. Also, while we catch glimpses into the social and political upheavals taking place in India during this time, since the women are on the periphery of these events, we see things from their limited perspective and so end up feeling like there’s a lot we’re missing just beyond the margins.  But those are minor complaints in comparison to what was truly a captivating story and a welcome burst of light into what has been rather dark reading of late.