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About The Book: The Potter's Thumb' is a novel written by Flora Annie Webster Steel. The story begins with two Englishmen, Dan Fitzgerald and George Keene, coming across a mother and her sick child on a dust heap in the city of Hodinuggur. The child is suffering from a condition called "the potter's thumb," which is said to be caused by a slip in the molding process when the potter is working with clay. The mother explains that many children are born with this condition and that it often leads to death. Fitzgerald is moved by the sight and reflects on the history and current state of the city and its people, noting that it is a place where past and present civilizations clash and overlap."The potter's thumb?" echoed Dan Fitzgerald, interrogatively. He was a tall man, broad in the shoulder, lean in the flank, and extraordinarily handsome; yet the most noticeable quality in the face which was looking down at the very ordinary woman squatting upon a very ordinary dustheap was not its beauty, but its vitality. About The Author: Flora Annie Steel (2 April 1847 – 12 April 1929) was a writer who lived in British India for 22 years. She was noted especially for books set in the Indian sub-continent or connected with it. Her novel On the Face of the Waters (1896) describes incidents in the Indian Mutiny. She was born Flora Annie Webster at Sudbury Priory, Sudbury, Middlesex, the sixth child of George Webster. Her mother, Isabella MacCallum, was an heiress. In 1867 she married Henry William Steel, a member of the Indian Civil Service, and they lived in India until 1889, chiefly in the Punjab, with which most of her books are connected.She grew deeply interested in native Indian life and began to urge educational reforms on the government of India. Mrs Steel herself became an Inspectress of Government and Aided Schools in the Punjab and also worked with John Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard Kipling's father, fostering Indian arts and crafts. When her husband's health was weak, Flora Annie Steel took over some of his responsibilities. She also wrote a popular history of India. John F. Riddick describes Steel's The Hosts of the Lord as one of the "three significant works" produced by Anglo-Indian writers on Indian missionaries, along with The Old Missionary (1895) by William Wilson Hunter and Idolatry (1909) by Alice Perrin. Among her other literary associates in India was Bithia Mary Croker.