Winsome McLintock, convent-fresh and virginal, is a young mixed-race woman making her way to Rangoon with new husband Desmond Goode. It is 1930 and the city is simmering with racial tensions and tropical pre-monsoon humidity. Winsome navigates her way through marriage, looming socio-political shifts, and inconvenient desire. She soon meets Englishman Jonathan Grace, who is to play a catalytic role in her sexual awakening. Against a backdrop of violent riots and symbolically torrential rain, the lives of Winsome, Desmond, and Jonathan become uncomfortably intertwined.

Winsome is an unadorned product of her time: often disappointingly acquiescent, programmed for shame. ‘Most mornings, it was not joy that she felt. She woke abruptly from disgraceful dreams, her thighs still sticky with an ebbing private pleasure, while Desmond snored behind her.’ But she is also sweetly naïve – not without charm, her Christian name not ironic.

Through Aung Thin’s patiently descriptive prose, balmy Rangoon, with its scents of beeswax, its bustling teahouses filled with white Britons served by dark-skinned waiters, its rickshaws and stray sandals and cries of protest, becomes a character itself, with more nuance and unpredictability than either insecure, condescending Desmond or fearful, uncertain Jonathan.

As an historical novel, it declares no grand statements; the characters are tragically obedient to their respective contexts. Where this novel succeeds, however, is as a romance: quiet, alluring, elegant.