The kashmir shawl
By: Rosie Thomas
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 468
ISBN-13: 9780007285969; 9781468308020; 9780007285983; 9781445876634
Subjects: Female friendship; Married people; Fiction
Description: Spanning decades and moving from the stark beauty of the Welsh landscape to the Himalayas and Kashmir, this is a story of bravery, courage and love. Newlywed Nerys Watkins leaves rural Wales for the first time in her life, to accompany her husband on a missionary posting to India. As war engulfs Europe, the Watkins are in remote Ladakh, high up in the Himalayas. Nerys is lonely, but she makes a glamorous new friend, Myrtle McMinn, who introduces her to the lakeside city of Srinagar.
Table of contents: title: Newlyweds Nerys and Evan Watkins leave Wales behind them to take up a missionary posting in India, in the 1930s. In the Kashmir lakeside town of Srinagar; title: home to the British, rosewood houseboats and the Club; title: Nerys gets caught up in a world of dancing and gossip, which is a million miles from her life as a preacher's wife. With her husband away on mission work in the snow-capped Himalayas, she is inexorably drawn to the enigmatic German mountaineer, Rainer Stamm. As the beating drums of war draw nearer, the women who are left behind in Srinagar form an extraordinary bond. But by the time the men return life has changed beyond measure for all of them. Years later, when Mair Ellis clears out her father's house, she finds an exquisite antique shawl. Wrapped within it is a lock of child's hair. Tracing her grandparents' roots back to India and Kashmir, Mair attempts to unlock the secrets of the past; title: a journey that will change her life forever.