About the book (from Wikipedia):
The Mountain Is Young is the fourth novel by Chinese-Flemish author Han Suyin. A love story set in Nepal, it was first published by Jonathan Cape, Ltd. London in 1958. It became a New York Times bestseller in Fiction that same year.
The novel is based on Han Suyin’s experiences as an invited attendee of the coronation of the King of Nepal, an event which is described in the novel. In the preface, Han Suyin writes that the book, while being a work of fiction, endeavors to give as exact a picture as is possible of the time. The school at which Anne Ford teaches, many other institutions and places referenced in the book, and of all the named characters, are invented.
The Mountain is Young is written in the confessional style and is considered to reflect autobiographical details of the author’s personal life, specifically the difficult ending of her second marriage with British officer Leonard Comber, and her meeting of the Indian army colonel, Vincent Ruthnaswamy, who would become her third husband.
The Mountain Is Young is set in Nepal in 1956. The protagonist, Anne Ford, is a writer whose husband is a retired colonial civil servant. She travels to Kathmandu on a vacation and to stay at a hill station where a new dam is being built, becomes a spinster English teacher at a Girls Institute there, and she meets and falls in love with the engineer in charge of building the dam, Yuni Menon, whom she meets by accident.
