Beyond the Letters

It’s very difficult to write some quality historical prose and even more difficult to set it in a foreign country, as it demands tons of research into the subject but Dinah Jefferies seems to be very hard-working in this aspect. I had some novels that I failed to finish, as throughout the text they felt awfully off-key with the period and the culture they described, but here I knew at once that the author knows what she is writing about. The setting is colonized Ceylon (presently Sri-Lanka) at the beginning of the 20 th century . From the very beginning the reader can feel that the author is in love with this country (the fact that she willingly admits in the postface telling about her childhood year spent in Malaya very similar in culture and wildlife and her trip to Sri-Lanka while writing the book). The novel vividly describes Sri-Lankan wildlife and people touching upon several cultural milestones. Anyway Sri-Lanka is not the main topic of the novel. This book is about pre