A really lovely book. At the beginning, I was half expecting it to go Passage to India, but this was a nuanced and immersive experience, with so much love for and understanding of the Indian characters. The building up of suspense, with Mary and the election is handled with exquisite skill, and I read the final chapters holding my breath, wondering how exactly Godden was going to resolve everything in a way that was both satisfying and realistic. The balance was struck in exactly the right place. Thank you so much for the opportunity to read this. I'm now going to search out more of her writing.

I think of this lovely, lyrical book as a love letter to India. Along the Coromandel coast is a hotel run by an Anglo-Inian woman. Guests arrive and stay at this magical place. This week, the week of a local election, the hotel is full.

In it there are campaigners for one of the parties, a bunch of lady archeologists, and a newly-married British couple. The book focuses on the wife, Mary, 18 and newly arrived in India.She is enchanted by the land, the people, and the animals. This puts her at odds with her diplomat husband,

Mary becomes involved with the life of the people at the hotel but, most importantly, with the campaign and candidate. In doing so she cuts herself off from and frustrates her husband. This has terrible consequences.

I love Godden's stately pace in her writings and I love her descriptions of India. This is a stately and wonderful book.

Rumer Godden’s Coromandel Sea Change is a book best approached with little information. Let’s just say that this exotic novel focuses on an old-fashioned hotel, Patna Hall, run by Anglo-Indians to the highest specifications. To this hotel come an ill-suited couple on their honeymoon — the hidebound junior diplomat Blaise Browne and his exuberant, free-thinking, much-younger wife, Mary. Married less than a month, the couple is already at odds, as he tries to control her and thinks more of his position than of his wife’s feelings. Can a trip to India change the course of their lives?

This bittersweet novel, first released in 1991, must have been set in 20th century India; after all, a local parliamentary election plays a large part in the novel and Mary Browne encounters a female constable. That said, the feel of Coromandel Sea Change definitely harks from before independence and partition, and Godden, who lived in India, off and on, for most of her life, truly captures the sights, sounds, smells and — well, sensation — of the country, as well as delivering a valentine to the high standards of hotels run by families, which deliver the service and luxury of a bygone day in this day of sterile chain hotels which try to overwhelm you with excess and über-modern gleaming glass and steel. Give me Aunti Sanni, Colonel McIndoe, and Patna Hall any day of the week, thank you.

In the interest of full disclosure, I received this book from NetGalley and Open Road Media in exchange for an honest review. Thank you so, so much for reissuing this gem!