Born in Bangalore, India, during the fading days of the Raj, Isla's early years were spent in the lush, verdant hills of Kerala on a tea plantation run by her father. This warm, spice-scented idyll was abruptly ended when, obliged by tradition and believing there were doing the best for their daughters, Isla's parents sent their daughters 'home' to baording school. Isla was not quite six years old. 'Home' as cold, gloomy, post-war austerity Scotland - a land of liberty bodices, chilblains, icy mornings and dank days: an alien land where for several yars she nursed an astonishing secret- of which only her sister, Fiona, was aware. Isla Blair writes lyricallly of her beloved India, stoically of term times in Spartan British boarding schools and with great humour and vivacity of the time after school when she became one of the younges students at RADA, training alongside Anthony Hopkins and others and throwing herself fully into life in London in the swinging sixties.

'She writes so easily, so effortlessly, so honestly. She seeems to be talking directly to me with a beguiling immediacy. She very often moved me to tears and then her wit and wicked sense of fun restores the balance.' Sir Derek Jacobi 'I loved the vivid picture of life on a tea plantation of the Raj and felt the tears well as I read her account of being dumped in Britain at the age of six. Her account of what acting means to her is a classic, and I'm sure will be often quoted.' Michael Frayn 'Delightful, touching and honest. A vivid and moving account of a way of life that wrenched families apart; extraordinary to us now, though considered quite normal at the time.' Geoffrey Palmer 'Isla Blair is known as a fine actress. Now, without doubt, she will be known as a fine writer. This is an acute and fascinating evocation of a vanished world, the world of the British Raj: painful, funny and eventually joyous because, above all, this is a beautifully written book about survival at a triumphant level.' Sir Ronald Harwood.