In this second, interracial love story, Thomas recasts the stubbornly white and Protestant genre of Anglo-American popular romance as a decolonised and itself irreducibly heterogeneous space of cultural interaction and exchange.

In My Beautiful Enemy, by contrast, Thomas attends to the region’s deep history as the site of cultural contact and exchange (dating back for many centuries before Western Europe took an imperial interest), emphasising its enduringly multi-ethnic and multireligious character.

A man as talented, handsome, and sought after by society as Leo Marsden couldnt possibly want to spend his entire life with a woman who rebelled against propriety by becoming a doctor. The last person Bryony Asquith expects to visit her on the North-West Frontier of British India is Leo Marsden, the handsomest, most talented man she has ever metnot to mention, her husband before their marriage was quietly annulled three years ago. The theme of separated lovers that have difficulty reuniting is well done, but there were also some. Not Quite a Husband portrays this region as a romantic space in which wounded love can heal and authentic selves can be revealed and as a white-imperial space where British grit and resolve and coolness under pressure can be demonstrated against a backdrop of anticolonial unrest. Their marriage lasted only slightly longer than the honeymoonto no one’s surprise, not even Bryony Asquith’s. Not as great as 'Not Quite a Husband,' but another good book from Sherry Thomas. Two critically acclaimed novels by the Chinese-born American romance author Sherry Thomas are set in part in part in the “Silk Road” regions of Central Asia: the 2010 award winning Not Quite a Husband, much of which plays out in the Swat Valley during the 1897 Pathan Revolt and the 2014 wuxia romance My Beautiful Enemy, whose flashback love story is set in 1883 in the Takla Makan desert region of Chinese Turkestan. Not Quite a Husband by Sherry Thomas 4.2 (67) eBook 7.99 Paperback 7.99 eBook 7.99 Audiobook 0.