M. M. Kaye's The Far Pavilions blended lurid oriental colour with homely occidental emotions. A quarter of a million copies have been sold in hardback alone, in less than a year. Shadow of the Moon, from the same hand and in the same manner, seems set to repeat that extraordinary success.

It's not in fact a new novel, having first seen the light of day, in abbreviated form, in 1957. But it is an extraordinarily apt successor to The Far Pavilions. Like that book it is a romance set in Victorian India. Like that book, again, its plot combines a dash of Kim with a good deal of Tristan und Isolde. Winter de Ballesteros, the heroine, is the orphan daughter of an English heiress and a Spanish aristocrat. Born in Lucknow and brought up in England, she is betrothed at the tender age of eleven to a distant relative...