The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters, the fourth novel from Balli Kaur Jaswal (Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows), is an absolute delight. It interweaves multiple family stories within the colorful panorama of a journey to India, resulting in a novel that is sad, joyful and exciting all at the same time.

Jaswal's narrative entwines the stories of three adult sisters whose disparate lives are catapulted on a new and completely different trajectory when their mother makes a request. With her death only hours away, India-
born Sita Kaur Shergill, who raised her children in England, says she wants her daughters to undertake a pilgrimage to India—one she was unable to take—and provides detailed instructions for the trip that are daunting, life--changing and often hilarious.

The Shergill sisters—Rajni, Jezmeen and Shirina—live very separate lives, each with its own secrets. The author enfolds readers in deceptively simple stories that reveal the hidden depth, humor and pathos of each sister's life, as little by little they learn and accept each other's stories. The teeming, textured setting of India is captured through the author's evocative scenes, as the sisters navigate on-the-ground travel as well as their own inner terrain. 

Jaswal's debut, Inheritance, won the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelist Award, while Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows was a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick. Here, three British-born Punjabi sisters—school principal Rajni, acting hopeful Jezmeen, and good-natured Shirnia—tamp down tensions as they travel to Amritsar's Golden Temple to conduct final rites for their recently deceased mother, as she wished.

Jaswal's witty, emotional second novel (after Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows) is a heartfelt story of three sisters agreeing to the wishes of their deceased mother. The Shergill sisters—Rajni, Jezmeen, and Shirina—travel to India to embark on a Sikh pilgrimage and scatter their mother's ashes. The sisters have never been close, and are quite distant now. Both Rajni, a school principal, and Jezmeen, a struggling actress, live in the U.K. Shirina moved to Australia, where she lives with her husband, Sehaj, and his controlling mother. Their journey in India is filled with bickering between Rajni and Jezmeen over Jezmeen's clothing choices, while Rajni and Jezmeen express concern over Shirina and her limited participation in the trip. As the three women view the splendor of some of the Sikh temples of India, the bond of sisterhood becomes stronger. When Rajni and Jezmeen sense that Shirina is in trouble, they are able to look past their own problems to come to her aid. Jaswal reveals much about the sisters' personalities through the use of flashbacks, explaining how previous events shaped their lives. Teen and adult fans of women's fiction will find much to appreciate here. Agent: Anna Power, Johnson & Alcock. (Apr.)