The Tea Planter's Daughter

The Tea Planter's Daughter opens Janet MacLeod Trotter's India Tea series, a multi-generational saga spanning colonial Assam and early-twentieth-century Britain.

When her father dies in 1905, eighteen-year-old Clarissa Belhaven and her younger sister Olive are uprooted from the tea plantation that has always been home and sent to live with a cousin in England. The novel follows Clarissa from that abrupt departure into her thirties, tracing how the loss of India — its landscape, its people, its rhythms — shapes the choices she makes in a country that never quite feels like hers.

Roughly the first quarter unfolds on the plantation before the story relocates fully to London, where Clarissa must reconcile the world she was raised for with the one she actually inherits.