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You can't spend much time in India without the issue of the religious conflicts in Ayodhya raising their heads. Whilst this book isn't set there, the action occurs under a cloud of the simmering racial tensions of a city where competing claims over a holy site have caused decades of trouble between India's Muslim and Hindu populations.

In this book, a group of local Hindus are preparing to take holy 'bricks' to Ayodhya for use in a controversial new temple.

Set in Uttar Pradesh, the book starts with the aftermath of a riot that left eight people dead, including Priscilla, the idealistic 24-year-old American who had been volunteering at a women's health clinic. The story is told through diary extracts, letters, police and journalist reports and interviews. There are plenty of voices chipping in with their take on the issues. Priscilla's parents have just arrived - bitterly divorced years earlier after the father's affair with his local secretary - hoping to understand what happened and to collect their daughter's effects.

This book is about prejudices - between religions, nationalities, castes and values. It's also a love story about two people divided by age, status, nationality and attitudes to relationships. Priscilla's married lover is the local bigwig, trapped (by tradition and perhaps a bit by choice too) in a loveless marriage. He wants to be with her but struggles with all he'd have to give up. She wants him to go to America with her, having the sense to see that she'd never be accepted in India as his partner. Despite having a wife and daughter, he can't handle HER not being a virgin. It's crazy, but entirely believable.

And against this backdrop, the locals are brewing for a fight.

It's very cleverly done. It touches so many different aspects of people's differences - of opinion, of belief, of heritage and much more.

I have to confess that by the end, I still wasn't entirely sure who killed Priscilla or why. And, oddly, I'm not sure that I needed to know.

A little like Kushwant Singh's 'The Train to Pakistan', this book takes major historical issues and humanises them through a love story and a tragedy.

It's good. Well worth a read and highly recommended.