by Paul Scott
First published 1998
In the dying days of British colonial rule, Hari Kumar returns to India—a stranger in his own land. Educated in England, he finds himself suspended between cultures: too Indian for his British peers, too anglicized for his countrymen. When he falls into a dangerous romance with a British woman, he triggers a sequence of events that will expose the brutal mechanisms of imperial power. Local tensions simmer, political resistance grows, and Hari becomes an unwitting catalyst in a system designed to crush individual desire. His personal struggle mirrors the larger conflict of a nation on the brink of transformation, where every relationship is a potential act of rebellion.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, british-literature
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, stranger-in-a-strange-land
Setting: India, Indian Subcontinent
Period: Waning Days of British Raj
607 pages · Paperback · University of Chicago Press
Content warnings: colonialism