Of India and the east
Explore the East India book list, featuring Crimea by Trevor Royle, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, and Bhowani Junction—essential reads on history, empire, and Asia.
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The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
by Franz Werfel
During World War I, Gabriel Bagradian learns of Turkish plans to exterminate the Armenians and leads five thousand inhabitants from his village to the mountain of Musa Dagh in hopes of defending themselves against a seige by a Turkish army bent on genoicde. Reprint.
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Bhowani Junction
by John Masters
First published in 1954 in the wake of the partition of India, John Masters' great novel Bhowani Junction has increased in stature over the years. Standing between E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and the acclaimed works of later writers such as Paul Scott and Salman Rushdie, Bhowani Junction is both a richly intriguing novel and a superb evocation of the tensions and conflicts at the birth of modern India.It is one of John Masters' seven novels which followed several generations of the Savage family serving in the British Army in India.Bhowani Junction is set in the wake of the partition of India, as the British prepare to withdraw from the newly independent country. Evoking the tensions and conflicts that accompanied the birth of modern India, the characters struggle to find their place in the new India that is emerging. In the last hectic days of the British Raj, Victoria has to choose between marrying a British Army officer or a Sikh, Ranjit, as she struggles to find her place in the new, independent India.It is Masters' most famous novel, and was made into a film in 1956, starring Ava Gardener and Stewart Granger.John Masters evokes the tensions and conflicts that accompanied the birth of modern India in his classic novel Bhowani Junction. Set in the late 1940's in the wake of partition it has become one of the great novels of India, alongside E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and the work of Paul Scott and Salman Rushdie. In the last hectic days of the British Raj, as the British prepare to withdraw from India, Victoria has to choose between marrying a British Army officer or a Sikh, Ranjit, as she struggles to find her place in the new India that is emerging.
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Crimea: The Great Crimean War, 1854-1856
by Trevor Royle
The war was a watershed in world history and pointed the way to what mass warfare would be like in the twentieth century.
