For fans of Balli Kuar Jaswal's Erotic Stories for Punjabi Women and Thrity Umrigar's The Space Between Us, Alka Josh's The Henna Artist by is lushly-rendered, emotional book club fiction set in post-Raj 1950s Jaipur about a young woman struggling to shape her own destiny in a world pivoting between the traditional and the modern.
On one level this work is the story of an airman's discovery of a small boy from another planet in the desert and his stories of intergalactic travel, and on the other hand it is a thought-provokin...