The Pagoda Tree, Hardcover

Tanjore, 1765. Young Maya plays among the towering granite temples of this ancient city in the heart of southern India. Like her mother before her, she is destined to become adevadasi, a dancer for the temple. She is instructed in dance, the mystical arts and lovemaking. It is expected she will be chosen as a courtesan for the prince himself.

But as Maya comes of age, India is on the cusp of change and British dominance has risen to new heights. Far from home, the East India Company is acting like a country in its own right and the British troops are more of a rabble than the King's army. The prince is losing his power and the city is sliding into war. Maya is forced to flee her ancestral home andheads to the bustling port city of Madras, where East and West collide.

In this new home, Maya captivates all who watch her dance, including Thomas Pearce, an ambitious young Englishman who has travelled to India to make his fortune. But their love is forbidden and comes at enormous cost.

Weaving together the uneasy meeting of two cultures, The Pagoda Tree is a captivating story of love, loss, fate and exile in 18th-century India.

Claire Scobie is an award-winning British journalist and author who has lived and workedin the UK, India and now Sydney. Her travel memoir, Last Seen in Lhasa (RandomHouse), won the 2007 Dolman Best Travel Book Award. Her novel, The Pagoda Tree, was first published by Penguin Australia and chosen by Good Reading magazine as one of their Best Fiction Reads 2013. Claire runs creative writing workshops at the Faber Academy in London and across Australia and hosts a literary tour to India at the Jaipur Literature Festival with Abercrombie & Kent. She writes for London's Daily Telegraph, Destinasian, the Sydney Morning Herald and others. She is a member of the British Guild of Travel Writers and in 2013 completed a Doctorate of Creative Arts at the University of Western Sydney.