Third in the epic quartet about the end of the Raj: “Scott throws us into India, wretched and beautiful . . . His contribution to literature is permanent.” —The New York Times Book Review

India, 1943: In a regimental hill station, the ladies of Pankot struggle to preserve the genteel façade of British society amid the debris of a vanishing empire and World War II. A retired missionary, Barbara Batchelor, bears witness to the connections between many human dramas—the love between Daphne Manner and Hari Kumar; the desperate grief an old teacher feels for an India she cannot rescue; and the cruelty of Captain Ronald Merrick, Susan Layton’s future husband.

This is the third novel in the Raj Quartet, a series of historical novels that “limn the Anglo-Indian world with its lovers, friends, family servants, soldiers, businessmen, murderers and suicides—all involved in one another’s fate” (The New York Times).

“Scott has the trick of being sympathetic without ever losing his clearsightedness.” —Times Literary Supplement

© 2010 The University of Chicago Press (Ebook): 9780226029283

Release date

Ebook: May 25, 2010