Author Description

Editorial Review "A charming, moving memoir of a pastoral Kashmiri childhood. Peter Hanley had British Indian parents but was raised single-handedly, with his brother, by his mother in the luxuriant valley of Kashmir, existing between two castes and classes, half-respectable, half-suspect as a family, bolstered by an Admirable Crichton of a steward in the shape of the magnificent Resha, one of the stars of this delicious memoir. Ark Minus Noah is principally a memoir of childhood delight, shadowed spasmodically by the incursion of various adult clouds. It's alternately charming, moving and amusing, evocative of the place and the time in a gently overwhelming way. Hanley writes beautifully about the natural world (the British colonists there were always rhapsodic about the place because it seemed to them like an idealized pastoral England) and, amongst other things, this book has the best writing about ducks you are ever likely to encounter...It is reminiscent of My Family and Other Animals, albeit relocated to the foothills of the Himalayas."