Ranikhet: a remote town spanning three hills in the Indian Himalaya, surrounded by oak, cypress and cedar, and to the north, the ice-white teeth of the highest peaks. Here, Maya begins to find peace after a time of great sorrow.But soon the world she has come to love is threatened by the town's new administration: elections are hijacked by powerful outsiders who sow division and mistrust. When her landlord's nephew returns to set up a trekking company, Maya is drawn to him despite herself, but his long hikes in the mountains evoke painful echoes of the past.By turn poetic, elegiac and comic, The Folded Earth reveals the strange shapes that India's religious and social conflicts can assume, even on distant mountaintops.