For Anne Hamilton, a three-month winter programme of travel and "cultural exchange" in a country where the English language, fair hair, and a rice allergy are all extremely rare was always going to be interesting, challenging, and frustrating. What they didn't tell Anne was that it would also be sunny, funny, and the start of a love affair with this unexplored area of Southeast Asia. A Blonde Bengali Wife shows the lives beyond the poverty, monsoons, and diarrhoea of Bangladesh and charts a vibrant and fascinating place where one minute Anne is levelling a school playing field "fit for the national cricket team," and then cobbling together a sparkly outfit for a formal wedding the next. Along with Anne are the essential ingredients for survival: a travel-savvy Australian sidekick, a heaven-sent adopted family, and a short, dark, and handsome boy-next-door. During her adventures zipping among the dusty clamour of the capital Dhaka, the longest sea beach in the world at Cox's Bazaar, the verdant Sylhet tea gardens, and the voluntary health projects of distant villages, Anne amasses a lot of friends, stories...and even a husband. A Blonde Bengali Wife is the "unexpected travelogue" that reads like a comedy of manners to tell the other side of the story of Bangladesh. All money earned from A Blonde Bengali Wife goes direct to the charity, Bhola's Children, of which the author and agent are active participants. A Blonde Bengali Wife isn't about Bhola but it is a tribute to Anne's journeys into Bangladesh and all the friends she has made there. Most of all, it is the story of the country that inspired Bhola's Children.

    Each of these stories says something revealing and memorable about the effects of war, migration and displacement, as new lives play out against altered worlds ‘back home.’"The book opens in a remote Bengal village in the 1930s when George VI was King Emperor of India. It moves on to stories set in the years of insurrection and war in Bangladesh. The second batch of stories begins with new migrants in the U.S., the war fresh in their memories. We stop in Boston in the 1970s where a graduate student from Bangladesh finds himself in the midst of a different sort of war. On to Detroit in the 1980s where a Bangladeshi ex-soldier tussles with his ghosts while flirting with the singer in a Blues club. The book closes with stories involving second-generation immigrants who discover that residues from their migrant history show up to influence their attempts to love, connect, and make life."