A very vivid picture of an Indian Hotel catering to the English and European travellers in earlier times and the interactions between the guests, staff and local community. A well-paced story that had me googling this author. I can see I need to read more of her titles. ( )

This is really excellent. Set in a hotel on the Coromandel coast of India, it is full of lively characters and happenings. Aunty Sani runs the hotel, and has done for years. She's immune to the suggestions of Cuckoo Vikram, the girl from the orphanage who is employed as hotel manager (but in fact just seems to want to reduce everything to the basest level). The hotel is full this week, with guests ranging from Sir John & Lady Fisher (old friends who have been coming for years) to the newly weds Mary & Blaise Browne. She's rather naive, but utterly captivated by India. He's an aspiring diplomat, horribly pompous and a complete arse. The hotel is full as there is an election, and the Root and Flower party is using the hotel as its base of operations. The double act of the Doctor and his sidekick is marvelously funny. And they can't seem to handle their charismatic candidate, Krishnan Pange. Throw into the mix a journalist, some intrigue and you get a week long stay in a hotel that no-one is likely to forget in a hurry.
Not everyone is very nice, not everyone does anything for the right reasons, but they are all very human. There is a whole range of characters in here and some of them end the week very different from the people they were at the beginning.
I liked the way that this both starts and ends with the nitty gritty of running a hotel, the contract washerman complaining about the number of sheets. It adds a certain rhythm to the book that makes is obvious how much has happened in such a short time. The only thing that left me slightly thinking "What a shame" was the way that the story dealt with Blaise. Yes, he was an arse of the highest order, but the way he was written out felt like the easy way out for Mary. Apart from that, a really excellent little story. ( )

"Coromandel Sea Change" is set in the same hotel as "Cromartie Vs.the God Shiva" which I read earlier this year, but unfortunately I was bored by the story and struggled to finish it, finally managing with the help of a late-night insomniac reading session last night. The story of a honeymoon couple who don't get on, and their growing estrangement as the wife gets swept up in the excitement of a local election and falls under the spell of Krishnan, the charismatic candidate for the Root and Flower party, is just the kind of thing I don't enjoy. ( )