A lost princess and a vanished world: a remarkable true story that moves from the Punjab of the Raj to 1930s Paris and the Second World War
'Remarkable and compelling' Edmund de Waal
'Thoroughly engaging' Kamila Shamsie
In a Mumbai museum in 2007, Livia Manera Sambuy encounters a photograph that will change her life forever.
The caption claims that the Punjabi princess Amrit Kaur sold her jewels in occupied Paris to save Jewish lives, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp where she died within a year.
For Livia, this marks the beginning of a compulsive search for the truth as she delves into the history of the British Raj, the diamonds and sapphires of the twentieth-century aristocracy, and the lives of extraordinary figures: bankers, jewellers, explorers and spies.
'An ambitious, absorbing work that peels back the layers of its enigmatic subject and digs deeply into the author's own emotional vicissitudes' Jhumpa Lahiri
'A tantalizing true story . . . In Search of Amrit Kaur plunges into the glittery world of Indian royalty' New York Times Book Review