KAYE, M. M. (MARY MARGARET ('MOLLIE') KAYE) — Cyprus

New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984. 1st American Edition; 1st Printing. Hardcover. This book is in Very Good+ condition and has a Near Fine dust jacket. The book and its contents are in mostly clean, bright condition. There is one small tear to the bottom edge of the last text page. The dust jacket is crisp and clean. "Subsequent to the 1947 dissolution of the British India Army attendant on India's achieving home rule, Hamilton had transferred to the British army where his career necessitated he and his family relocate twenty-seven times over the next nineteen years, with Kaye utilizing several of these locales in a series of crime novels which inaugurated the utilization of the pen name M. M. Kaye, the writer's previous published works having been credited to Mollie Kaye. Kaye's literary agent was Paul Scott who had been an army officer in India and who would find fame as author of the Raj Quartet. It was with Scott's encouragement that Kaye wrote her first historical epic of India Shadow of the Moon published in 1957. The focal background of Shadow of the Moon is the Sepoy Mutiny with which Kaye had been familiarized via stories heard as a child from her family's native servants, this early interest being reinforced in the mid-1950s when Kaye on a visit to friends in India chanced on some transcripts of trials attendant on the Sepoy Mutiny in a shed on her friends' property. Kaye would later state her displeasure over the original published version of Shadow of the Moon being edited without her knowledge, with sections focused on action rather than romance being largely deleted. " (from Wikipedia). Very Good+ in Near Fine dust jacket .