Holy Cow

A highly readable and entertaining travel memoir.

Kate Hosking is perfectly cast, lending her exuberant style to this rollicking tale.

The author is a widely popular Australian journalist.

After backpacking her way around India, Sarah Macdonald decides she hates the country with a passion. When a beggar at the airport reads her palm and insists she will one day return - and for love-she screams 'Never!' and gives the country, and him, the finger. Eleven years later, the prophecy comes true. When the love of Sarah's life is posted to India, she quits her dream job as a national radio presenter to follow him to the most polluted city on earth, New Delhi. It seems like the ultimate sacrifice for love and it almost kills her - literally. One dank, smoggy night, a naked Sadhu smeared in human ashes curses Sarah and she falls dangerously ill with double pneumonia. She defeats death, not before facing some series questions about her own fragile mortality and inner spiritual void, not to mention some unsightly hair loss. It's enough to drive a rapidly balding atheist to drastic action - in this case a wild journey of discovery through India in search of the meaning of life and death. And with the help of the Dalai Lama, a goddess of healing hugs and a couple of Bollywood stars - among many, many others - Sarah discovers a hell of a lot more. Often hilarious, sometimes hair-raising and always entertaining, Holy Cow is a rollercoaster ride through a land of chaos and contradiction, from spiritual retreats and crumbling nirvanas to war zones and New Delhi nightclubs, that only a woman on a mission to save her soul, her love life - and her sanity - can survive.

"Kathy Lette meets Tom Robbins on a slow train to Varanasi with Bill Bryson supplying the onion bhajis ... very, very funny." — Peter Moore

"Hilarious and incredible." - B Magazine