Maya’s Revenge

‘Wacky, witty, zippy and playful, yet also sharply knowing and well observed, Maya’s Revenge reads like the wayward love child of an unholy three-way clinch between Indiana Jones, Shobhaa De and James Tod, trained in courtly arts by Vatsyayana then sent to a polo-playing finishing school by Jilly Cooper. It’s a law unto itself, completely unpredictable and the greatest fun.’ William Dalrymple When the young orphan Bindy enters the palace of oil-rich Sheerpur as personal assistant to Princess Riddhima, she is entranced and repulsed by the glamorous lives of twenty-first-century royalty, with their vast privileges and gleaming excesses, their swanky cars and priceless jewels, and retinues of obsequious, immoral servitors. Conspiracy theorist Adam Addison introduces Bindy to the legend of an ancient order of beautiful assassin yoginis who, it seems, have been contracted to murder the crown prince, Riddhiraj. This handsome rake, whose seductions are as numerous as they are uncaring, has nevertheless cast a thrall over hapless Bindy, and stars prominently in her erotic dreams … Set in an India that is a federation of princely and republican states, where khadi-clad politicians conspire with glittering princes, and khaki-clad policemen chase vaporous assassins, Maya’s Revenge is a dark fantasy shot through with the piquancy of political drama.