A new novel set partly in Ladakh

Liz Harris, The Road Back, Choc Lit,  2012. £7.99

It’s not likely that many reviews of self-identified (?-confessed) ‘romantic’ novels will appear on this blog but this one is special. Its inspiration was the same album, compiled by the author’s uncle, which also inspired our Himalayan Encounters pamphlet (see below). Many of the scenes photographed for the album – people as well as places – and described in its notes are visited in the central section of the novel, making for an unusual, perhaps unique, background to a well constructed and effectively told tale. 

This background is perhaps subject to a slight chronological slippage, given that the album with its many authentic details of a vanished way of life dates from the early 1940s, while the two main characters encounter each other about twenty years later, at a time when the region was a bone of contention between India and Pakistan post-partition, not to mention China muscling in. For one thing, it is doubtful whether travel to and within it would have been quite as easy for Brits as it appears here, if indeed it was possible at all.(Politics as such are largely absent, although there is obviously an awareness of imperialist attitudes, culture clashes and other social issues.)  Such pedantic caveats aside, it’s a good read, and an impressive and original first novel,

Related SmothPubs pamphlet: Himalayan Encounters: Ladakh 1944. (Notes on a ‘Trip’ from Srinagar to Khalatse) by Kenneth Behrens.(2011). 20pp. £1.50: pdf here.

UPDATE (June 2017)

A new pdf of the pamphlet with the images is now available