It is a landscape which a few hours ago, between the rainfall and the short twilight, extracted colour from the spectrum of the setting sun and dyed every one of its own surfaces that could absorb light: the ochre walls of the houses in the old town (which are stained too with their bloody past and uneasy present) the moving water of the river and the still water of the tanks the shiny stubble, the ploughed earth, of distant fields the metal of the Grand Trunk road.

Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Crane had been conscious of standing where a lane ended and cultivation began: a different landscape but also in the alluvial plain between the mountains of the north and the plateau of the south. “Few people have written about India quite as seductively, or as intelligently, with a sense of loss but also a sense of responsibility and fallibility.” - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Read more “Paul Scott’s vision is both precise and painterly.” - The New York Times Book Review The politics are handled with an expertise that intrigues and never bores, and are always seen in terms of individuals.” - New Republic “What has always astonished me about The Raj Quartet is its sense of sophisticated and total control of its gigantic scenario and highly varied characters . . . On the night after the Indian Congress Party votes to support Gandhi, riots break out and an ambitious police sergeant arrests a young Indian for the alleged rape of the woman they both love. It opens in 1942 as the British fear both Japanese invasion and Indian demands for independence. The Jewel in the Crown is the first of Paul Scott’s renowned 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).

The first novel in the epic quartet about the last days of British rule in India, “as much a story of romantic love as it is of crime . . .

The jewel in the crown by paul scott