Download The Jewel in the Crown: The Raj Quartet, Book 1 AudioBook Free
The Raj Quartet, Paul Scott's epic review of British isles India in its final years, has no identical. Tolstoyan in range and Proustian at length but completely individual in effect, it records the encounter between East and Western through the experience of twelve people caught up in the upheavals of the next World Battle and the growing marketing campaign for Indian freedom from Britain. The first book, The Jewel in the Crown, details the doomed love between an British girl and an Indian youngster, Daphne Manners and Hari Kumar. This affair details the lives of other character types in three succeeding volumes, the majority of them unknown to Hari and Daphne but mixed up in larger social and political conflicts which demolish the fans. In The Day of the Scorpion, Ronald Merrick, a sadistic policeman who arrested and prosecuted Hari, insinuates himself into an aristocratic British isles family as World Battle II escalates. On occasions unsparing in its review of personal dramas and racial differences, the Raj Quartet is at all times profoundly humane, not least in the publisher’s capacity to recognize with a huge range of character types. Additionally it is illuminated by delicate social comedy and wonderful evocations of the Indian world, all narrated in luminous prose. The other two books in the Raj Quartet, The Towers of Silence and A Department of the Spoils, are also available from Everyman’s Library. With a fresh introduction by Hilary Spurling
(Book Jacket Position: Jacketed)
