Born in London and educated at Oriel College, Oxford and University College London, Martin Moir was for many years deputy director of the British Library's Oriental and India Office Collections, as well as a lecturer in Overseas Administrative History at the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, University College London. He is the author or co-editor of several publications dealing mostly with modern South Asian history and archives, including A General Guide to the India Office Records (1988), Writings on India by John Stuart Mill (1990), The Great Indian Education Debate (1999) and Preserving Pakistan's Past (2002). Since 1991 he has been an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Information Studies, University College London.
Timothy, a diffident young British academic and Huma, a feisty young Indian woman, have been invited to the remote and apparently peaceful Himalayan region of Kalapur, to work on an important monastic chronicle. However, they soon discover that a false version of the chronicle is being used by the authoritarian regime in Kalapur to suppress the secrets of a past that threatens its legitimacy. Things are complicated by a secret resistant movement led by guerrilla fighters called the Migos, named after the yetis still believed to live in the remoter parts of the region. Encouraged in their quest by a sympathetic and enigmatic local abbot, Huma and Timothy face great dangers in their search for the truth, discovering along the way, the depths of their own relationship. An adventure story, an orientalist romance, a psychological study and a serious enquiry into the notion of historical perspective, Not Exactly Shangri-la explores a world that is at once both strange and familiar.
