After 77 pages of family background--her mother was the daughter of a China-based missionary and her father was a British army officer--bestselling novelist Kaye ( The Far Pavilions ), at age 82, recalls her 10 years of idyllic childhood in India as a time in paradise, and her nine years of adolescence in England as a time in purgatory. Although written with gushing, romantic enthusiasm, her kaleidoscopic story of a long-lost innocence just before and after World War I helps to explain Kaye's idealization of the British Raj and her love for Kipling's verse. These loving memories of a beautiful land and its delightful people may surprise readers of Paul Scott's much better written Raj Quartet , but it is probably equally authentic.