MISS TIMMIN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS

An intense irreverent love story and a dark murder mystery Miss Timmins' School for Girls tells the story of a conventional young woman who leaves her cloistered small-town home to teach at a remote boarding school run by British missionaries. It is also a coming of-age novel set at the confluence of three great cultures - the protagonist's conservative middle-class Brahmin family; the British colonial universe of the boarding school; and the rock 'n' roll drugs free love philosophy of the 1970s - filtered to this small corner of India. Young Charu finds herself in a school that is still run like an outpost of the Empire with Scottish dancing scripture studies and porridge for breakfast. By day Charu shares Shrewsbury biscuits and tea with the school's British missionaries and teaches Shakespeare to a hothouse of privileged Indian girls; by night she is drawn to the troubled and charismatic Moira Prince - a fellow teacher harbouring secrets of her own - and her pot-smoking hippie friends. Then one monsoon night a teacher is murdered and the ordered world of the school and the town - peopled by colonial-era eccentrics small-town gossips and hippie misfits - is thrown into chaos. Charu finds herself implicated in the murder and suddenly her real education begins.