The Jewel in the Crown, Part 1 of 2

About this book

Part One Of Two Parts August, 1942. The Japanese are marching on Burma. In India, Ghandi talks sedition. It is hot and nerves are raw. Then a gang of rioters rapes a young Englishwoman. Thus opens volume one of Paul Scott's acclaimed series The Raj Quartet. Scott pictures a number of memorable Britons and Indians caught at the end of an epoch, and shows us the effect it will have on them all. "I read all four books, one after another...in an undiminished hungry daze. Though I knew Scott was dead I had an impulse, as I shut the last volume, to write the man a letter...he had poured prodigious amounts of imagination, skill and wisdom into his work, but somehow I wanted him to give me more!" (The New Yorker)