Share of Summer Books in Order

Share of Summer is not a novel sequence but a three-volume autobiography. Read in order, The Sun in the Morning, Golden Afternoon, and Enchanted Evening trace Kaye's life from childhood in India through school in England, back to India, then into China, London, love, loss, and the slow beginning of her writing life.

India is the constant.

The first volume, The Sun in the Morning, covers her early years and makes clear how completely India shaped her. Simla, family life, servants, travel, seasons, stories, and the sharp pain of being sent away to England are all part of the emotional foundation. The second, Golden Afternoon, returns her to India as a young woman and lingers over the Delhi Season, Kashmir, Rajputana, and the everyday rituals of a world that would later feed so much of her fiction.

Enchanted Evening carries the story forward from 1932, when her father's work takes the family to China. It also moves through grief after her father's death, the start of her adult independence, early work in illustration and publishing, and the discovery that writing could be more than a private wish. By the end of these books, you can see the raw material that later became the novels: family lore, military circles, long journeys, and a deep habit of noticing place.

This is memoir, not fiction, but it often reads with a novelist's eye.

Kaye is very good at building a room, a train journey, a hill station, or a social season from small particulars. She likes clothes, weather, nicknames, odd relatives, old houses, and the way a place sounds at a certain time of day. She is also plainly attached to the vanished world she is describing. That does not make these books neutral histories. They are personal, opinionated, affectionate, and sometimes stubborn. The payoff is that they feel lived in rather than tidied up.

The real through-line of Share of Summer is home, or the problem of home. England is where she is sent. India is where she feels she belongs. That tension gives the memoirs much of their pull. Alongside it runs another thread, the making of a writer. You can see how her later fiction grew out of memory, family stories, travel, and the emotional fact of loving a place that was changing fast.

If you come to these books after The Far Pavilions or the Death In mysteries, expect something quieter but closely related. The same eye for setting is here. So is the interest in people living between worlds, between countries, between childhood and adult life, and between history as public event and history as private memory. Read them in sequence, and the autobiography becomes its own kind of long narrative, warm, detailed, and full of the places that mattered most to her.