The first memoir about a woman’s experience in Kashmir, one of the most volatile and alluring places on the globe This is a magical memoir of a land now consumed by political and religious turmoil, a richly detailed story of a girl’s passage into maturity, marriage, and motherhood in the midst of an exquisite and fragile world that will never be entirely the same.“For those who only associate Kashmir with the violence that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, Koul’s lovely, elegiac memoir The Tiger Ladies shows that the isolated vale in the Himalayas was a heaven before it became a hell.” —Bryan Walsh, Time ASIA“This magical, sensuous memoir . . . casts its quiet spell over the reader. The writing is so evocative that you feel you are there, seeing, tasting, touching, and smelling this once enchanted place.” —Scotia W. MacCrae, Philadelphia Inquirer“The Tiger Ladies is immensely, gracefully sad, an elegy for the customs and the courtliness of an irrecoverable civilization. Yet there is a sensuality running through her story . . . provided by Ms. Koul’s devotion to Kashmiri cuisine and her description of how she has, through her kitchen, sought to keep alive the old Kashmiri ways.” —Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street JournalSudha Koul is author of Curries without Worries and Come with Me to India: On a Wondrous Voyage through Time. She lives in New Jersey with her family. Read Less