The Woman in the Bazaar

A psychologically acute novel set in the heat and hypocrisy of British India, where Captain George Coventry brings his young English bride, Rafella Forte, into the gilded cage of colonial marriage. She is devoted. He is possessive. When she strikes up an innocent friendship with a handsome barrister, George's jealousy curdles into something dangerous - a terror that drives his wife into the night, where she vanishes without a trace. Years later, with another chance at love before him, George cannot outrun the legend that haunts the bazaars: a whispered story of an Englishwoman sold into slavery, a ghost he fears he created. Alice Perrin writes with cool precision about the violence that hides behind polite colonial facades, the way jealousy poisons not just the jealous but the very air their victims breathe. This is a novel about what men believe they own, and the horrors that belief can unleash.