Wonderful suggestions have been made in this folder; the list in the header is impressive. My own to-read (or to re-read) book stack is getting ever taller.
I'm not sure all of you know that a small group of us has just completed a months-long discussion and summarization of volumes 2 o 4 of Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet. Some time ago we discussed here the first volume, The Jewel in the Crown,, but a number of questions remained unanswerable. It made us want to explore what happened to the protagonists we'd come to care about, and to the villain who appalled us.
In the author's own words at the end of Volume 4, "A Division of the Spoils is the last in a sequence of four novels about the closing years of British rule in India. The characters are imaginary. So were the events. The framework (the period between 1942 and 1947) was as historically accurate as I could make it. ..."
The recognition this literary masterpiece deserved eluded Paul Scott. But he had more to say. In 1977 he published a fifth book, a sort of coda, or epilogue to the Raj Quartet, with the title Staying On. It describes what happened to one (rather un-assuming) military couple readers encountered in Volume 2, who did not go home but chose to cling to their bungalow in the hills in the same region - which fell to Pakistan after partition in 1947. The action takes place twenty-five years later. Colonel Tucker and Lucy Smalley have grow old together. How are they interacting with the Pakistani help ? What is their life like?
It was this small volume of 216 pages that finally brought the author lasting fame and the Booker Prize award. He was too sick to accept it in person and died a year later at age 58.
And it is this book that the patient readers of the Raj Quartet and I would love to read here. We believe it is the real conclusion to a fascinating, epic story and might well be of general interest.
Therefore I'd like to suggest this book for reading here in the not too distant future (because tempus fugit = time flies).
At this time I'd also like to invite all of you, inveterate readers, to join us in the discussion. It would run for the customary four weeks 24/7 and questions would be offered for consideration.
To reiterate, it is a slim volume containing sixteen brief chapters. It is available on line (in an old-fashioned-looking print), and in paperback (easier to read for sore eyes). Many of you may recall the British Granada TV production and Masterpiece Theatre presentation ,Jewel in the Crown, sown in this country in the eighties.
But rest easy : no foreknowledge of that is necessary because Staying On stands on its own.
Pakistan is in the news daily, it is an iportant political and military power in a very dangerous area of the world where our troops ar fighting. Wouldn't it be interesting to see what Pakistan was like in 1972, twenty-five years after Partition?
