Set in the final years of Queen Victoria's reign, at the beginning of the end of Empire in India, Flies to Wanton Boys records the life of Marian Chase as she defies convention to cross continents. Ignoring repeated advice that 'this is no place for a woman', she travels through India in search of experiences and relationships more extraordinary than she could ever have expected from her comfortable middle-class upbringing in London and on the South coast.
Intoxicated by India; its colours, its sights, its people, she survives landslides and bandit tribesmen in the mountains of the Northwest Frontier, running aground on the mighty Brahmaputra River and devastating monsoon floods in the tea plantations of Upper Assam.
And on her journey, she marries, gives birth to a daughter, is widowed, and then marries again to a man whose power and ego finally leave her abandoned and homeless.
Her eventual return to England, to the family she left behind fifteen years earlier, is not enough to relieve the grief she feels at having squandered the life she once had.
Marian was a remarkable woman who kept meticulous diaries, revealing with unique honesty not just the places and peoples she embraced but her emotions, her doubts, and her fears until eventually she had no energy left.