LindaHoleman.com | In a Far Country

"I came perilously close to drowning during the baptism. It was my second; the first, performed when I was an infant, obviously hadn’t ‘taken’. My mother insisted that my father, being a man of God, perform this repeat baptism in the late summer, just after my fifteenth birthday.”

- from In a Far Country

From the jacket:

Pree Fincastle, daughter of impoverished British missionaries in India, is left alone and destitute when tragedy strikes. Turned away by the Church, she embarks on a journey in search of Kai, the son of her mother’s ayah, and the only person she can trust. But Kai is not the man Pree thought he was, and the secrets he holds will unlock the door to another world, another time – and, shockingly, another life.

Haunting, powerful, and heartbreaking, In a Far Country tells of an enthralling journey. From the whispering Ravi River to the bustling Grand Trunk Road, from the cantonments of Lahore to the bazaars of Peshawar, this is a breathtaking story of penury and prostitution, of tragedy and bloodshed, of secrets and love. But ultimately it is a story of hope; a story that, once read, will never be forgotten.

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The inspiration behind the prose...

The idea of “lost children” is particularly poignant to me, and is one of my fictional themes. It’s been reflected in other novels I’ve written, especially in the young adult genre. In Promise Song I wrote about Home children sent from the UK to Canada, alone, to spend lives of hardship on isolated farms. In Search of the Moon King’s Daughter I wrote of the plight of chimney sweeps, little abandoned or stolen boys who often didn’t outlive their fifth birthday. And here it is again, rearing its head in In a Far Country. Although this is an adult novel, with very adult themes, I started with the idea of the children separated from their parents and sometimes lost in the Sepoy Uprising in India in 1847.

Included in this novel is a secondary theme: family secrets. We all have them. Some secrets are long-buried and almost forgotten, only nudging to the surface when someone will not stop questioning. And other secrets are public knowledge, but through shame or confusion the family carries an unspoken rule, never acknowledging or speaking of a person or situation.

This is this last of the three books which I loosely refer to as my “Indian trilogy.” They’re not a trilogy in the true sense in that each of the three books, The Linnet Bird, The Moonlit Cage, and now In a Far Country, are completely stand-alone. And yet if a reader starts with the first book, which begins in Liverpool in 1823, and moves on through to the third, ending in Bombay in 1885, the link between the novels will be uncovered.

— Linda Holeman