This was the book I was reading when the music stopped and we all went into lockdown for the pandemic. It took me a good six weeks to read when normally I would have averaged 10 days. I wasn’t sure whether it was the mental confusion caused by the world being turned upside down that stopped me concentrating, or just because I didn’t like the book much. I wondered too whether my enjoyment of reading was too interlinked with my enjoyment of sitting in cafes and watching the world go by. After all that’s where I do more than eighty percent of my reading normally. With no cafes and no world going by it started to feel like a chore to pick this book up, and I only read it when standing in line waiting to go into Tesco.

It took forever to get into, and even when I did it had a bitty feel - you would get used to a certain scenario and then, oops, someone would die and there would be a jump shift and the whole thing would move to a different time and a different country. I never felt we had the time to get used to any of them. Then we had the final stretch which I hated most of all - first the central character changes personality and becomes quite arrogant. Fine - no problem, and probably understandable, but then we are expected to sympathise with her as she indulges in some overwrought angst over her on-off love interest, finally culminating in an only-in-fiction coincidence to round the whole thing off. I liked the author’s depiction of India - Bombay in particular - and there were parts of the novel that I liked but they never lasted long enough to make this an overall enjoyable reading experience. ( )

A good read, but not ultmately a great one. ( )