No one does nuns and the religious life quite like Rumer Godden, and this wonderful book shows her at the height of her powers. It’s a simple enough tale – a group of well-meaning nuns set up home in an abandoned palace in the Himalayas. Full of enthusiasm for their mission, they eagerly start a school and a clinic, a lace-making enterprise for some older girls, and offer a warm welcome to the native community. Such high hopes. But it’s not long before tensions start to grow, for these are very human nuns, full of human doubts, longings, regrets, temptations and desires and their future looks increasingly uncertain. Well-written, well-paced, with sympathetic characterisation and authentic dialogue, and with vivid and evocative descriptions of the landscape, this is a real gem of a book and a thoroughly absorbing and engaging read.

It's hard to rate this book, because it's masterfully written and yet it's not one I could say I "enjoyed". The overwhelming sense of impending doom, the feeling that each was becoming lost in her own way - and yet also becoming more - and the effect of the overshadowing mountain kept me reading, and waiting. Even their small triumphs felt somehow lessened by what was to come, though their growing understanding of the people and the impact of the cultural differences kept my inner anthropologist watching with great interest. In the end, they went out to change Mopu but it changed them.

Black Narcissus by Rumer 'Peggy' Godden is a free NetGalley ebook that I read in mid-January.

When I had viewed the Criterion release of Black Narcissus on film in 2016, I had nominated it as easily the best film I'd seen all year (despite its true release in 1947). And, though it's simple to parse out all the characters, what they represent, and how the literary version of Mr Dean is so much more detailed and less brash than David Farrar's guffaw of a guy, the book and the film (hell, the whole emotional property) has to do with temptation, sin, and giving into one's base, selfish desires while in a isolating, high-pressure, same-sex, near-impoverished environment.

"She had a sudden sense of dismay that came from the house and not from Mr Dean; a sense that she was an interloper in it and the convent life no more than a cobweb that would be brushed away...."