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The Raj Quartet, Volume 1 The Jewel in the Crown

Pages
472
Published
1998
Language
English

Synopsis

The first volume of Paul Scott's classic account of the last days of British rule in India No set of novels so richly recreates the last days of India under British rule—"two nations locked in an imperial embrace"—as Paul Scott's historical tour de force, The Raj Quartet. The Jewel in the Crown opens in 1942 as the British fear both Japanese invasion and Indian demands for independence. On the night after the Indian Congress Party votes to support Ghandi, riots break out and an ambitious police sergeant arrests a young Indian for the alleged rape of the woman they both love.

About the author

P
Paul Scott

Paul Scott (1920–1978) was an English novelist best known for The Raj Quartet, his four-novel account of the final years of British rule in India: The Jewel in the Crown (1966), The Day of the Scorpion (1968), The Towers of Silence (1971) and A Division of the Spoils (1975). He served with the British Indian Army from 1943 to 1946, an experience that shaped his fiction. His novel Staying On, a coda to the Quartet, won the Booker Prize in 1977.