This memoir tells of a love affair across a racial divide over a century. Vikram Seth's great uncle, Shanti, raised in India and sent to Germany in the 1930's to study, is taken in as a student lodger by Vikram's great aunt and her family. First we see through his eyes an astonishing tapestry of India, then survival and loss during the Third Reich and the Second World War, Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Israel and Palestine, post-War Germany and modern Britain. "It is a meditation on love, courage and friendship ...and on those acts of spontaneous generosity which are all that is left to maintain faith in humanity." (Antony Beevor, The Times.)

Released at the Book Crossing Meet-up.