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The Spell Of The Flying Foxes

The Spell Of The Flying Foxes

Sylvia Dyer
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Champaran, 1845. Drawn to the rich, fertile land to farm Blue Gold, indigo, Alfred Augustus Tripe settles by the river Baghmati. A whole village of workers emerges nearby as Tripe starts a family with an Indian heiress. Nearly a century later, Tripe’s sprawling home and most of his family are destroyed in the devastating Bihar earthquake of 1934. Now his only granddaughter, Gladys, must find a way to stop her unscrupulous cousin Harry from usurping her entire inheritance and turning her young children destitute. A formidable dacoit leader miraculously comes to her rescue, India gains independence, and the flying foxes, the bearers of good fortune, disappear.

In sparkling, lyrical prose, Sylvia Dyer, Gladys’s daughter, brings to life a world of picturesque beauty, love and hope intertwined with social ills, and a time when the passionate freedom struggle threatened the very existence of Anglo-Indians in India.

Imprint: India Penguin

Published: Nov/2018

ISBN: 9780143065340

Length : 264 Pages

MRP : ₹299.00

The Spell Of The Flying Foxes

Sylvia Dyer

Champaran, 1845. Drawn to the rich, fertile land to farm Blue Gold, indigo, Alfred Augustus Tripe settles by the river Baghmati. A whole village of workers emerges nearby as Tripe starts a family with an Indian heiress. Nearly a century later, Tripe’s sprawling home and most of his family are destroyed in the devastating Bihar earthquake of 1934. Now his only granddaughter, Gladys, must find a way to stop her unscrupulous cousin Harry from usurping her entire inheritance and turning her young children destitute. A formidable dacoit leader miraculously comes to her rescue, India gains independence, and the flying foxes, the bearers of good fortune, disappear.

In sparkling, lyrical prose, Sylvia Dyer, Gladys’s daughter, brings to life a world of picturesque beauty, love and hope intertwined with social ills, and a time when the passionate freedom struggle threatened the very existence of Anglo-Indians in India.

Buying Options
Paperback / Hardback
Ebooks

Sylvia Dyer

Sylvia Dyer was born in 1928 and grew up in the wilds of Champaran in north Bihar, on a plantation pioneered as an indigo estate by her great-grandfather, an Englishman. She spent ten years of schooling at St Helen's Convent at Kurseong, Darjeeling, was married twice, and widowed both times, to Indian Army officers. There were two sons from her first marriage and a daughter from the second. She now lives in Pune and her two surviving children have settled abroad.

Something Strange and Sinister – an excerpt from ‘The Spell of the Flying Foxes’

It is a commonly held belief in India that flying foxes augur prosperity. They were certainly abundant in the Champaran region of north Bihar. Here in 1845, an Englishman, Alfred Augustus Tripe, fascinated by the prospect of farming indigo, known as Blue Gold, was drawn to its isolated wilderness. In The Spell of the Flying […]

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