A giant saga about the Raj period of India starting with the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857. Our young hero is a half-caste and his true love will be an Indian Princess - an unattainable love. The book moves right along and is a page turner. Historic background is brief or nonexistent but the story and descriptions of life inside Indian Courts where women live in purdah and the cultural misunderstandings between British and Indians is good. ( )

The Far Pavilions by M. M. Kaye is one of the most enthralling historical novels I've read in a long time. I've always been fascinated by the world of imperial British India since the little tastes of it in Burnett's The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, and I'm only sorry I didn't discover Kaye's novel sooner.

Ashton Pelham-Martyn, born in India to an English sahib, is raised by a Hindu servant after his father's camp succumbs to cholera. The serving woman Sita tries to take him back to his people, but their return coincides with the bloody Indian Rebellion of 1857 against the British. Fearing for the child's safety, Sita renames him Ashok and flees to the remote country of Gulkote to build a new life. After rescuing the local prince from a near-fatal "accident," Ash is taken into service at the palace where he makes new friends—and enemies. Thus begins the saga of his life and the larger life of India as a whole, more than a thousand pages of intrigue, adventure, love, danger, and war.

Ash, as he is called throughout the book (the author thereby sidestepping the choice whether to identify him primarily as Ashton [English], or as Ashok [Indian]), is a fascinating character. Competent, intelligent, reserved, and passionately committed to what is just, Ash is neither British nor Hindi and must find his way between those two disparate cultures. As an officer in the famous Corps of the Guides, he is both valuable and unpredictable—valuable for his fluency in more than just language, but unpredictable to his superiors because he lacks the comfortably insular racial prejudice of either people. Ash suffers from no indecision about what is right, but it lands him in trouble more often than not.

The story is colorful and riveting, with believable characters and dialogue. There are several high points where I read breathlessly, racing to find out what would happen. The valiant last stand of the doomed Kabul embassy is gripping, but anything following the Bhithor episode is anticlimactic. I wish Juli didn't fade so quickly into the background following Bhithor, too.

Kaye is a skilled writer who knows her characters and their world intimately. The setting is perfectly realized and effortlessly communicated to the reader; you can tell that the author was born in India and spent much of her life there. She has a sympathetic eye for the customs and colors of Indian culture and for how the Indian mind works. The deeply immersive setting reminds me of a fantasy story with unusually brilliant worldbuilding; everything is so foreign and yet so logical in its own right.

I have enjoyed Kaye's mysteries, which are fun (if a bit formulaic), but this is a far more serious and sweeping work that is well worth the time to read and I look forward to reading her other historical novels. Utterly absorbing and beautifully executed, The Far Pavilions is a story that will stay with me for a long time. Highly recommended. ( )