A Tiger in the Garden
This long, epic saga takes place in India over two years, 1878 to 1880. Impossible to pigeonhole, it is part love story, part coming-of-age, part exchanged identity, part political thriller, and part Indian history. The throughline tells the story of Lily Shawcross, a sixteen-year-old English orphan travelling to India to live with relatives. She is kidnapped and ends up in the harem of a rajah, Sherdil, in the fictitious northern valley kingdom of Sherabagh. He wants to marry her and have her produce an heir, but Lily, immature and selfish at this point, continues to refuse all his blandishments and attempts at seduction. The story of Lily and Sherdil goes on and on, while the villains who had originally kidnapped her are off-stage for most of the book. There are side sections that go into different periods of Indian history, which some may find jarring. All the seemingly disparate parts do come together through the last hundred pages or so, in a satisfying and sometimes surprising tie-up of the multiple threads.
This book took me a long time to read because of the sheer length. I loved the immersion into this complicated tale of an exotic, romantic, sometimes treacherous land. The extensive appendices and bibliography show how knowledgeable Edghill is about her material. I thought Sherdil and Lily’s story stretched out a bit too much, and the many varying historical periods and stories packed in between the love story could be distracting. At the end, however, it all came together in a glorious whole, like a patchwork quilt or an intricate, oriental carpet. Highly recommended.
