The kingdom was in ferment, about to undergo a revolution that would end a despotic monarchy and bring in multi-party democracy.

Now, 15 years on, to Thapa's distress, Nepal is again under absolute rule after King Gyanendra's seizure of power in February.

Thapa has written a gossipy primer -- "An Elegy for Democracy, Forget Kathmandu" -- to Nepal's tortured past and present that reviewers have praised as one of the most readable accounts of the country's confused politics.

"We already have had generations of struggle for democracy. Now another generation has been lost that will have to fight to claim back democracy," she says in an interview with AFP at a New Delhi coffee house.

Thapa, who normally lives in Kathmandu, is staying in New Delhi for the time being and she says she does not known when she will return to her country.

She says she does not "feel personally targeted" in Nepal. But she says she does not want to live with "the level of fear" existing now in Nepal where journalists, politicians and other critics of the king's rule are regularly rounded up.

Thapa says she wrote the book to find out what has gone wrong with Nepal, which foreigners often regard as a Shangri-La paradise for hippies and trekkers.

"It isn't easy for a Nepali to trace what has gone wrong because so much has," says Thapa, a diplomat's daughter who spent many of her younger years in the United States and speaks English with a US accent.

"Yet if we in Nepal have been unable to understand our present, so too has the rest of the world," says Thapa, who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design before deciding that she wanted to write.