Set against the backdrop of Gandhi's calls for independence and a potential Japanese invasion, four masterful historical novels--The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence, and A Division of the Spoils--covering the period between the Quit India riots of 1942 and the massacres that accompanied independence and partition in 1947 provide insight into the closing years of British rule in India.

Set against the backdrop of Gandhi's calls for independence and a potential Japanese invasion, four masterful historical novels--The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence, and A Division of the Spoils--covering the period between the Quit India riots of 1942 and the massacres that accompanied independence and partition in 1947 provide insight into the closing years of British rule in India.

Product Description: This revisionist study of the novels of Paul Scott breaks new ground in literary and postcolonial discourse. Using previously unpublished archival materials and contemporary place theory as fulcrums to examine Scott’s narrative method, Janis E...read more

Product Description: Ex-Chief Minister Mohammed Ali Kasim's detainment by police officers at his home in Ranpur is the first of the wholesale arrests of influential Indians suspected of sympathizing with the Congress Committee's call on the British to quit India...read more

When Albert falls off a mountain top he's rescued by the Cloud Children, who are as light and airy as feathers and play amongst the rainbows and storm clouds up in the sky. But soon Albert feels homesick and begins to wonder how he will get home.

After writing the Raj Quartet, Paul Scott produced this graceful novel of life in post-colonial India. It is 1972, long after the British have left the hills of Pankot. STAYING ON -- or more precisely, hanging on -- are Colonel Tusher Smalley, an irascible, but endearing arachronism faced with a dwindling supply of rupees and loss of his way of life. With him is his nostalgic wife Lucy, living on memories, Hollywood movies and her will to keep her husband alive. Pitted against them is Mrs. Bhoolabhoy, their landlady, who wages a bitter domestic war against her tenants. In the end this conflict gives Tusher and Lucy something to rally around -- something that strengthens their love for for each other. "A graceful coda to the earlier Raj Quartet." (Time)

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.

While high in the mountains with his parents, Albert falls off a cliff and ends up in Cloudland, where he enjoys playing with the cloud children, but misses his parents.

The author offers a portrait of the enigmatic Paul Scott, detailing his youth, his years in India and the Far East, his career as a literary agent, the development of his writing, and his strange private life