This novel paints the portrait of three women in three different eras. They don’t seem to have anything in common besides the place where each of them has chosen to live: Pondicherry, India. Their reasons for moving there are varied. In 1930, Alice goes to join her husband, a doctor in charge of the leper colony; in 1950, Oriane wants to go back to places from her childhood that she has only the faintest memories of; and finally, in 2012, Céline has fled a dramatic family situation.

Each of the three newly arrived women are introduced to a city that readers get to see evolve over time: from a sleepily remote French colony in the 1930s to a bustling city trying to figure out how to throw off the colonizers’ yoke in the early 50s to a profoundly Indian, but also deeply marked by its history, city in the early twenty first century. Alice, Oriane and Céline are also frequently taken aback – shocked, even – by what they see going on around them: the continued existence of the caste system despite government bans; the dire poverty of the lower classes; the mistreatment of women; the religious fervor bordering on fanaticism; the outbursts of violence, injustice and manipulation of all sorts – yet above and beyond those difficulties, the people of Pondicherry’s determination to live in hope for a better future.

The narrative switches between the three eras as it unfolds, so it isn’t until the very end of the novel that we find out what connects Alice, Oriane and Céline.

In this debut novel, Anne Vantal bases a real page-turner of a story in a scrupulously accurate historical context and a place that she knows – she has visited repeatedly over the course of forty years. She spent time in Pondicherry consulting newspapers from the various eras to make sure every detail was accurate. She has intertwined fictional elements with historical facts, and meticulous economic data. So her fictional characters and complex plot are planted on a sturdy structure with a thousand fascinating details drawn from history