Breakfast with the Nikolides : A Virago Modern Classic

INTRODUCED BY ROSIE THOMAS Breakfast with the Nikolides was always to be the last hour of her childhood . . . For Emily Pool, India is a magical place where she has the freedom to escape her mother's suffocating influence. Her days are spent exploring the canals and gardens of East Bengal and observing her neighbours, the Nikolides. While her parents paper over the cracks in the family home - and in their veneer of respectability - the Nikolides offer a glimpse of glamour and sophistication. Then a tragic crisis plunges Emily into a world of adult deceit, and reveals that nothing in the community is quite as it seems . . . 'She has distilled in simple, luminous prose the experiences of expatriate India, of childhood and its innocence' Lucy Hughes-Hallet'A heart-wrenchingly truthful evocation of the transition from child to adult, combined with Godden's pitch-perfect descriptions' Guardian'A genius for storytelling' Evening Standard