Few Britons, surely, know India as well as Mark Tully, who has lived and worked there as the BBC's south Asia correspondent for 25 years. Here he tries his hand at fiction with a collection of elegiac little tales set in the villages of the western state of Uttar Pradesh. They are written in a flowing, folksy style, and their appeal lies chiefly, perhaps: ironically, in fact - for instinctively the reader feels that these characters are based on real people, which makes their dilemmas all the more engaging: the barren woman who, while her husband goes off to pray for a child, takes action of a rather more pragmatic nature; the old Muslim ikka wallah whose pony and trap business is literally on its last legs; the student whose reckless college love affair threatens to undo her happy arranged marriage.
