Valley of the Kings

Colin Thubron’s compact, elegant and beautifully written new novel opens with a woman undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumour. Kathleen has had a successful career as an actor and is married to Robert, a pompous neurologist with whom she is planning to go on holiday to Egypt. The operation stalls and so is postponed until their return from the Valley of the Kings. This passage to Egypt, where Robert, in an ironic echo of E.M. Forster’s Adela Quested, hopes to see the ‘real’ country, is complicated by the inclusion of Robert’s younger brother, Alan.

At the age of 13, when some girls become passionate about ponies, Anjana Khatwa developed an infatuation with rocks. Growing up in a Hindu family in Slough, she had a moment of epiphany on holiday in south-east Kenya when she walked across an ancient lava flow and felt convinced that the rock beneath her feet was ‘an animate entity… alive with stories that needed to be heard’. From then on, rocks have been, well, her rock. More than a geologist, Khatwa calls herself an ‘earth scientist’. So, while there is plenty of geology in this book, some of it mildly challenging (‘Along with other silica-rich microcrystalline rocks such as obsidian and agate, flint breaks with a conchoidal fracture’), there is also mythology, folklore, ecology and spirituality.