From the bestselling author of The World of Susie Wong, a breathtakingly cinematic story full of tragedy and romance, set in 1940s India.
Englishman Richard Birkett lives for danger and adventure, so when he is given a perilous mission to India he jumps at the chance. Tasked with convincing a young communist to assassinate the King of Nepal, he ventures into the exotic unknown - concerned only with fulfilling his assignment and finding adventure along the way.
But when he meets Lakshmi, a beautiful Indian girl trapped in an unhappy marriage, everything changes and there is suddenly far more at stake . . .
A tragic story of intrigue, espionage and heady, intoxicating love, The Fever Tree is a vividly painted portrait of a lost time.

Richard Mason was born near Manchester in 1919. He served in the RAF during the Second World War before taking a crash course in Japanese and becoming an interrogator of prisoners of war. His first novel, The Wind Cannot Read, which drew on these experiences, won the 1948 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was made into a film starring Dirk Bogarde. All of his following novels were also cinematised, most famously The World of Suzie Wong, about an artist's romance with a Hong Kong prostitute. His last novel, The Fever Tree, was published in 1962. Mason moved to Rome in the early 1970s and lived there until his death in 1997.