The Wheel of Surya

A beautiful new edition of the first volume in the Surya Trilogy by Whitbread award-winning author Jamila Gavin. India, August 1947: Fleeing from their burnt-out village as civil war rages in the Punjab, Marvinder and Jaspal are separated from their mother, Jhoti. Marvinder has already saved her brother’s life once, but now they both face a daily fight for survival.

Together they escape across India and nearly halfway around the world to England, to find a father they hardly know in a new, hostile culture… A powerful story of culture, class, family and faith set against the backdrop of Indian independence and the Partition of India and Pakistan. Perfect for fans of The Bone Sparrow, Morris Gleitzman’s Once, and Katherine Rundell’s The Wolf Wilder.

— Jamila was born in Mussoorie, India, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Her Indian father and English mother met as teachers in Iran and by the age of eleven she had lived in an Indian palace in the Punjab, a flat in a bombed out street in Shepherd’s Bush, a bungalow in Poona, near Mumbai and a terraced house in Ealing. She settled into a little town cottage in Stroud, Gloucestershire twenty five years ago but she still loves to travel.

She won the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year award with her book Coram Boy in 2000.