JOE ROBERTS

Joe Roberts stayed for five months with the Trivedis family in Bangalore, while travelling all over southern India. In Pondicherry he found Rita, a melancholic divorcee banished to an ashram. He saw the great temple at Madurai, watched the snakeboat races at Arunmala, stayed with Syriac Christians at Cochin and was offered heroin in a Jewish cemetery. Wherever he went he met extraordinary people, but these encounters take second place to his ripening friendship with the Trivedi family, and his exact chronicling of their neighbours. As Major Trividi warned him nothing is as fixed as you think. Three-Quarters of a Footprint has long fascinated readers with its gentle, perceptive humour, chilled occasionally by a shadow of menace, as if the spirit and wit of R K Narayan had been reborn in an Englishman.