Himalayan Dhaba
A Novel
by Craig Danner
List Price: $13.00
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0452283876
Publisher: Plume
In the early 1990s, Craig Danner and his wife found themselves the primary medical practitioners in a remote and rudimentary hospital high in the Indian Himalayas. Working without modern medicines and equipment, they struggled with language and cultural barriers, forged deep friendships with the hospital staff, and did their best to treat thousands of local villagers and wayward travelers. During that long winter in the Himalayas, when the snows closed the passes and the hospital became quiet for several weeks, Craig Danner began writing a novel that has already won both critical acclaim and a Book of the Year Award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association.
Craig Danner is a native Oregonian and fourth-generation bootmaker, who holds a license to practice medicine as a physician assistant. He studied creative writing at Macalester and The Evergreen State colleges, and has lived and worked in Indonesia, the South Pacific, India, Nepal, Mexico, and Ecuador. "I started writing Himalayan Dhaba during the winter of 1991, while my wife and I were working in a hospital in the mountains of Northern India. The story began as a screenplay. The world we were immersed in was so visually stunning, it seemed the perfect setting for a movie. But as the characters evolved and their stories took hold of
the writing, they demanded the time and development that can only be accomplished in a novel. I still think it would make a great movie, but it's an even better book."
The author lives with his wife on a small farm in rural Oregon. He is at work on his next novel.
Visit www.himalayandhaba.com.
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Q: How would you describe Himalayan Dhaba?
CD: Himalayan Dhaba is the story of Mary, an American woman doctor struggling to run a hospital in the mountainsof northern India. The novel tells how five very isolated and extremely disparate people find themselves touching bottom both physically and emotionally, and how their lives become enmeshed as they each find a very different pathway to redemption. I can't stand reading novels about people that are completely unsympathetic, so I crafted my characters so even the most despicable ones act in such a way that you understand what motivates them. The novel is about how these people find their way out of their own personal hells; about how fate and their own decisions get them back to the surface of life. Apart from
the characters, Himalayan Dhaba is also a story about a place. I wanted to cast a description of this town and the surrounding valley and mountains as it was when my wife and I lived there. Walking through some of the nearby villages was like passing through a window of time, watching people wearing homespun wool, living in stone and-timber houses that could have been built centuries before. And yet, the town itself was growing frantically, and I know that even in the last ten years it has changed significantly, and not necessarily for the better. I wanted a record of the place as we knew it. As I handed first drafts of each chapter to my wife for her reaction, she would invariably ask, "where are the smells?" I'm a very visually oriented person, and she would remind me that sounds and smells were as much a part of the experience as the beauty and ugliness. I'd go back and spend hours trying to fit the other senses into the rhythm of the story.
Q: Do you see yourself in any of your characters?
CD: Doctor Mary's experiences were closest to my own, but I think there's a bit of my personality in each of my characters—even the nasty ones. Once Phillip was strapped to his board, I had to imagine seeing through his eyes so that I could describe what he saw . . . and when I did that, I would also imagine what he was feeling, both physically and emotionally. For me to understand him well enough to make his story believable, then he must in some way be me. But thank goodness I have other parts of my personality that have some tact and social skills.
Excerpted from Himalayan Dhaba © Copyright 2012 by Craig Danner. Reprinted with permission by Plume. All rights reserved.
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