M.M. Kaye, 95, the author of lushly and lustily detailed books set in Africa and India, including the bestseller "The Far Pavilions," died Jan. 29, it was reported in England. No cause of death was provided. Ms. Kaye, who sometimes wrote as Mollie...

THE SUN IN THE MORNING My Early Years in India and England St. Martin's. 454 pp., $24.95 By M.M. Kaye IN A LATE chapter of this heart-winning memoir, two little girls of English blood are shown weeping on the deck...

It's intriguing how certain themes and subjects can be dormant for years and then, for some uncanny reason, they suddenly catch the popular imagination. In the 1960s Africa was "in" and now, I'm glad to say, it seems to be my country, India. Until quite recently, anybody writing on India for a Western audience was usually told, sadly but firmly, by his publisher that "India just doesn't sell." (p. 903)

[In Trade Wind Kaye's] theme is, as always, the collision between western values and native culture in remote corners of the world in the mid-19th century. But Kaye recognizes all the moral ambiguities raised by this titanic clash of alien cultures. Her narrative indicts hypocrisy, intolerance and the inability of many westerners to appreciate or understand local customs. But she carefully avoids blanket indictments or the shrill rhetoric of anti-colonialism. For those who have read her earlier novel...

Miss Kaye has lived in India much of her life and her forebears have distinguished themselves in service in that country for more than a century. [Shadow of the Moon], centered in the Indian Sepoy Mutiny, is dedicated to them. The story beginning in a mid-Victorian setting in England that is hardly less strange by present-day standards than India itself, is the tale of a young girl, half British, half Spanish, who was born in India but reared chiefly in England after the death of her parents. Her mother, dy...