Deborah Moggach •
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
(also published as These Foolish Things) •

Muriel is afraid to remain in London after she has been mugged and her flat burgled. Jean and Douglas are pursuing their passion for new horizons (“a couple of vagabonds, that’s us”). Sex-obsessed Norman is being offloaded by fed-up relatives. Evelyn finds her life has become “like meat with the goodness boiled out of it” since the death of her husband. The one person in England she feels close to is her “chatty, affectionate” manicurist.

This disparate group migrates to a retirement colony in south central India (“Bournemouth-in-Bangalore,” one resident jokes) that caters to British pensioners. Initially suspicious of one another, they gradually form a haphazard community while awaiting the inevitable. “Like jumping into the sea on a freezing day. You go first and tell me what it’s like.”

There are alliances and separations, pasts recaptured and secrets revealed. And no one, native or expatriate, is proof against the alchemy of the subcontinent. “Like a kaleidoscope, India had shaken Ravi and settled his pieces into a different arrangement.”

It’s Moggach’s succinct, spot-on observations, by turns wry, poetic, and matter of fact, that lift the book so far above its film counterpart. She has a gift for seeing straight to the core of a matter and laying it bare for us; insights dot the pages like so many grace notes. On illness: “They were utterly alone, for sickness is the loneliest place on earth.” On assisted living: “Like being at a new boarding school with no possibility of going home.” On tours: “Why did guides always tell you the things you didn’t want to know?” On India: “The very word India sharpened her senses, like squeezed lemon.”

The marginalized elderly, too often viewed as “surplus to requirements,” show their mettle in this quirky, colorful, and often hilarious tale.