One is a creepy teenager whom Viva has also been hired to chaperone, or at least to keep him out of trouble. Buried there are her parents and her sister, a family she rarely mentions and never particularizes.Īboard ship, a variety of men enter the scene. Lying about her age and her knowledge of travel, she is desperate to return to the country of her birth. Viva, only a few years older, is Rose and Tor’s ostensible chaperone. She is the one who most obviously is fishing. Tor, a “big-boned” gal who so far has been unlucky at love, will be Rose’s bridesmaid. Now she is committed to wed someone she barely knows. A quick courtship on British soil led to a hasty engagement.

Rose goes to India to marry Jack, a cavalry officer she has met only five times. Julia Gregson has written a fun novel, with a healthy dose of history, alluring local color, and three charmers who find India almost too hot to handle.

Technically, only Tor is a fishing fleet girl, but the whole trio gets involved in romance on the high seas and then in distant Bombay, Punjab, and Simla. East of the Sun features Rose, Tor, and Viva, who left London in 1928 to seek adventures and eligible men. The “fishing fleet” is a pejorative term describing those marriageable British women who sailed to India in search of husbands. Julia Gregson’s novel, East of the Sun, invites her readers to join the “fishing fleet.” I happily did so, and thus escaped into an exotic early twentieth-century milieu.

East of the Sun by Julia Gregson