Sir Thomas More by Hals Holbein (Accessed via Wikipedia ) During lockdown, we had Time. Remember that? I was in my probationary year of teaching: almost certainly among the most exhausting years for any profession. All my time had been taken up with school work, and I regularly stayed at school until after 6pm, having arrived there at eight in the morning. Now, children, this is not sustainable and, very soon, I decided I didn’t like working where I was. Then I realised that I didn’t like teaching at all. But, in fact, neither was particularly true: I just needed to be true to myself and to say no, which would give me the ability to manage my work/life balance in a more appropriate way. What does this have to do with historical fiction, I hear you say? Well, during March 2020, we went into lockdown and suddenly I went from working ten-hour-days to ten-hour-weeks. I met up with my class on Google Meet, I put work up for them on a meticulously designed Google Classroom, but I just h...
For this week's #HistFicThursdays blog, I'm thrilled to be sharing the wonderful book The Fortune Teller of Katmandu by Ann Bennett, as part of her Coffee Pot Book Club tour. In her guest post, Ann shares her approach to research. But first, let's meet the book...
Blurb
A sweeping wartime tale of secrets and love, mystery and redemption, moving from the snow-capped Himalayas to the steamy heat of battle in the Burmese jungle.
Perfect for fans of Dinah Jeffries, Victoria Hislop and Rosie Thomas.
Hampshire, UK, 2015. When Chloe Harper’s beloved grandmother, Lena dies, a stranger hands her Lena’s wartime diary. Chloe sets out to uncover deep family secrets that Lena guarded to her grave.
Darjeeling, India, 1943, Lena Chatterjee leaves the confines of a strict boarding school to work as assistant to Lieutenant George Harper, an officer in the British Indian Army. She accompanies him to Nepal and deep into the Himalayas to recruit Gurkhas for the failing Burma Campaign. There, she discovers that Lieutenant Harper has a secret, which she vows never to reveal.
In Kathmandu, the prophesy of a mysterious fortune teller sets Lena on a dangerous course. She joins the Women’s Auxiliary Service Burma (the Wasbies), risking her life to follow the man she loves to the front line. What happens there changes the course of her life.
On her quest to uncover her grandmother’s hidden past, Chloe herself encounters mystery and romance. Helped by young Nepalese tour guide, Kiran Rai, she finds history repeating itself when she is swept up in events that spiral out of control...
"A great read" Advance Reader.
" Thank you so much for allowing me to read the advance copy. I could barely put it down!" Advance Reader,
"What a wonderful book... I loved it. The dual time lines were delineated to perfection... the settings were perfectly rendered.." Advance Reader.
The Fortune Teller of Kathmandu Keeper
is available on #KindleUnlimited via this Universal Link
Guest Post
The Fortune Teller of Kathmandu – My Research.
Thank you for inviting me to contribute to your blog. I’m delighted to be able to share a few insights into the historical research I did for The Fortune Teller of Kathmandu.
I’m fascinated by history and always do a lot of research for my books. The Fortune Teller of Kathmandu was no exception.
This book is set partly in the modern day, but mainly in India, Nepal and Burma in the 1940s. The lead character, Lena, a young Eurasian girl living in Darjeeling in British India, leaves the confines of her strict boarding school where she is working as a teacher, to work on the nearby army base. She finds herself accompanying recruiting officer, Lieutenant George Harper into remote mountains of Nepal to recruit Gurkha soldiers for the Burma campaign being fought against the Japanese.
In response to a fortune teller’s prophesy, she volunteers to join the Wasbies (the Women’s Auxiliary Service (Burma)) and is sent to the Burmese jungle to provide morale-boosting refreshment and luxuries to front line troops.
What did make this book slightly easier to research than some of my previous books, was that I’d already written about the Burma campaign in one book (The Lake Palace) and had touched on it in another (The Tea Planter’s Club). The Fortune Teller of Kathmandu is my tenth book about the second world war in South East Asia, so I’d already done quite a bit of research on the wider campaign before I started.
In this book I drew together a few strands that had fascinated me and about which I wanted to find out more.
Firstly, I was interested in the Gurkhas who were recruited in great numbers from Nepal to support the Burma campaign. I wanted to include something about the process in the book. For that research I found a number of online resources, but the most fascinating and rewarding research I did was to visit the Gurkha Memorial Museum in Pokhara, Nepal, where there is a wealth of information about the Gurkhas, about how many very young men were recruited from remote villages during the war and how often their army salary would be vital for the survival of their families. I read the inspiring stories of many individual soldiers and viewed records and photographs from conflicts they’d been engaged in.
I was particularly interested in the rigorous selection process the young men still have to go through before they are accepted into the Gurkhas. They are already tough and strong from a childhood in the Himalayas, but their physical prowess is stretched to the limit by various tests they have to complete. The most notorious of these is the “doko race”, in which they have to run a 5km mountain route within 55 minutes with a rattan basket with 25kg of rocks on their backs.
My second line of research was about the Wasbies (The Women’s Auxiliary Service (Burma). I’d never heard about this intrepid group of women before I was researching the Burma campaign for The Lake Palace but I stumbled across stories of Wasbies serving tea and cakes to frontline soldiers from converted Chevrolet vans. I went on to read the diary of a Wasbie, Maria Pilbrow Front Line and Fortitude, by EJ Lockhart-Mure. It really brought home hardships those brave women went through.
I was interested to learn that the Wasbies had to learn to drive the trucks themselves, so in my book, Lena has to undergo driving lessons with a severe sergeant. I also discovered that sometimes the Wasbies found themselves so close to the fighting that they had to be evacuated, in particular from near the front at Kohima – and I included this detail in the book too.
Now, let's meet the author:
Ann is also author of The Runaway Sisters, bestselling The Orphan House, The Forgotten Children and The Child Without a Home, published by Bookouture.
The Lake Pavilion, The Lake Palace, both set in British India in the 1930s and WW2, and The Lake Pagoda and The Lake Villa, set in French Indochina during WW2, make up The Oriental Lake Collection.
Ann is married with three grown up sons and a granddaughter and works as a lawyer. For more details please visit www.annbennettauthor.com.
You can follow Ann on these links:
Thank you for hosting Ann Bennett today.
ReplyDeleteTake care,
Cathie xx
The Coffee Pot Book Club