An irresistibly loving, enchanting story of family life in a beautiful place--a dance of love and grief and rebirth set on a gorgeous island in the Indian Ocean.

An island filled with exotic flora and fauna and perfumed air. A large family compound presided over by a benign, stalwart grandmother. A very tall South Asian heroine with the astonishing un-Indian name of Meterling, who has found love at last in the shape of a short, round Englishman. Numerous aunts, uncles, and young cousins, among them: Mina, grown now, telling this story of a marriage ceremony that ends with a widowed bride who, in the midst of her grief, discovers she is pregnant. Mina and her young cousins follow every nuance of gossip, trying to puzzle out what is going on with their favorite aunt, and as Meterling--torn between Eastern and Western ideas of love and family, duty and loyalty--struggles to make a new life, we become as entranced with this family, its adventures and complications, as Mina is, and with her celebrate a time and place where, although sometimes difficult, life was as sweet as honey.