Rainy Day Reads

I expected this to be fiction based on true events, but actually it is a non-fiction book detailing the life and love of James Kirkpatrick in India. It is marketed as a great love story between an English man and an Indian woman, destined to be kept apart by race, religion and social standards but overcoming the odds to be together anyway.   The book is very detailed and built mainly on letters, many of which survive in estates and the East India Company’s files. This makes for an accurate, but sometimes slightly dry retelling of actual events. There is so much detail about people and politics that the love story drowns in it. I would say this book is mainly about James Kirkpatrick and his life. His lover Khair features very little in it.  It takes a while for the book to get to James, as it first sets up the entire backdrop of the British in India and the principle figures, both political and familial. This just doesn’t really interest me and for this part of t...