Indians Don't Kiss

29-year-old Hannah Walker returns to India, where she spent her childhood, to visit her parents. Shaven-headed ('you look like a madwoman!') and evasive, she carries with her a delicate internal debate about her sense of direction and identity and about the baby she is secretly carrying. On the surface, she is the dutiful daughter, but ideas of sex and love bubble away beneath the narrative like a pungently-spiced curry - from Hannah's unborn child to her attempts to consummate her flirtation with a young Indian. An intimate and dryly understated novel, Margaret Burnett's debut is a thoroughly modern exploration of questions of guilt, love and family ties.