The House at the Edge of the Jungle Book

No one meeting Isabel Bennet and her brother, Victor Cartwright, would imagine their childhood to have been anything but that of a middle-class English girl and boy. But thirty years ago they were hastily piled into a ship just ahead of the invading Japanese army and taken from Kuala Lampur in Malaya, the only home they'd ever known, and dispatched to an elderly aunt in England. Victor was just a baby, but Isabel was old enough to remember and mourn the fact that they never saw their parents again. Their mother had disappeared mysteriously into the jungle just after Victor was born. Their father and his mistress remained. Now it is 1973. Victor, grown to a starchy and conventional adulthood, must go to Kuala Lampur on business. Miraculously, or so it seems to the flighty and romantic Isabel, he asks her to come along, an act he quickly regrets. Defying her husband, a man almost as stiff and conventional as Victor and even duller, Isabel takes off, nearly delirious with anticipation. She has been "obsessed," as Victor disapprovingly puts it, to see their childhood house again and to learn what she can about their parents, especially about her mother. It is a surprise to Victor to be told by Oliver Bailey, a local colleague, that their father was a famous and much-honored scientist in the all-important rubber industry there. Then Victor breaks his leg and is hospitalized after visiting their old home, and Isabel meets Bailey, who knows her parents' true story. Her life turns upside down. Guilt, forgiveness, love, all come into play as the facts unscramble. In one of the most enthralling and poignant dramatizations of the way the past has a hold on the present, and set against the exotic East and the ominous jungle, Mary Morgan recalls Somerset Maugham but with a woman's voice, a woman's story, told as only a gifted woman writer can tell it.Read More