In the land of no right angles

the long version

Alex , a twenty-year-old American student, is spending the year in Nepal, backpacking and photographing. As a favor to Will -- her American friend -- she uses one of her Himalayan treks to seek out Maya, a young Nepali woman desperate to flee her traditional family to find work in Kathmandu. But helping Maya has unforeseen implications. Soon Alex is embroiled in a strange triangle with Maya and Will, where the lines between friendship, love, and lust grow more tangled every day. Over the course of the next eight years, Alex returns to Nepal: first to visit and to photograph, then in an attempt to help the troubled Maya. Moving between Kathmandu, New York, and the grim houses of prostitution along Falkland Road in Bombay, Alex begins to understand the pitfalls of trying to be both adventurer and savior in an unfamiliar world. In the Land of No Right Angles introduces the fiction of Daphne Beal, whose evocations of life in Nepal, and of the universal conflicts inherent to love and friendship, mark the arrival of a stunningly talented, intuitive writer.From the Trade Paperback edition.