The Siege Of Krishnapur

The Siege Of Krishnapur PDF Author: J.G. Farrell
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0297858033
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
In the Spring of 1857, with India on the brink of a violent and bloody mutiny, Krishnapur is a remote town on the vast North Indian plain. For the British there, life is orderly and genteel. Then the sepoys at the nearest military cantonment rise in revolt and the British community retreats with shock into the Residency. They prepare to fight for their lives with what weapons they can muster. As food and ammunition grow short, the Residency, its defences battered by shot and shell and eroded by the rains, becomes ever more vulnerable. The Siege of Krishnapur is a modern classic of narrative excitement that also digs deep to explore some fundamental questions of civilisation and life. 'Suspense and subtlety, humour and horror, the near-neighbourliness of heroism and insanity: it is rare to find such divergent elements being controlled in one hand and being raced, as it were, in one yoke. But Farrell manages just this here: his imaginative insight and technical virtuosity combine to produce a novel of quite outstanding quality' The Times 'The magnificient passages of action in The Siege of Krishnapur, its gallery of characters, its unashamedly detailed and fascinating dissertations on cholera, gunnery, phrenology, the prodigal inventiveness of its no doubt also well-documented scenes should satisfy the most exacting and voracious reader. For a novel to be witty is one thing, to tell a good story is another, to be serious is yet another, but to be all three is surely enough to make it a masterpiece' John Spurling, New Statesman

The Siege Of Krishnapur

The Siege Of Krishnapur PDF Author: J.G. Farrell
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0297858033
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the Spring of 1857, with India on the brink of a violent and bloody mutiny, Krishnapur is a remote town on the vast North Indian plain. For the British there, life is orderly and genteel. Then the sepoys at the nearest military cantonment rise in revolt and the British community retreats with shock into the Residency. They prepare to fight for their lives with what weapons they can muster. As food and ammunition grow short, the Residency, its defences battered by shot and shell and eroded by the rains, becomes ever more vulnerable. The Siege of Krishnapur is a modern classic of narrative excitement that also digs deep to explore some fundamental questions of civilisation and life. 'Suspense and subtlety, humour and horror, the near-neighbourliness of heroism and insanity: it is rare to find such divergent elements being controlled in one hand and being raced, as it were, in one yoke. But Farrell manages just this here: his imaginative insight and technical virtuosity combine to produce a novel of quite outstanding quality' The Times 'The magnificient passages of action in The Siege of Krishnapur, its gallery of characters, its unashamedly detailed and fascinating dissertations on cholera, gunnery, phrenology, the prodigal inventiveness of its no doubt also well-documented scenes should satisfy the most exacting and voracious reader. For a novel to be witty is one thing, to tell a good story is another, to be serious is yet another, but to be all three is surely enough to make it a masterpiece' John Spurling, New Statesman

The Siege of Krishnapur

The Siege of Krishnapur PDF Author: James G. Farrell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


The Singapore Grip

The Singapore Grip PDF Author: J.G. Farrell
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590174178
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description
Singapore, 1939: life on the eve of World War II just isn't what it used to be for Walter Blackett, head of British Singapore's oldest and most powerful firm. No matter how forcefully the police break one strike, the natives go on strike somewhere else. His daughter keeps entangling herself with the most unsuitable beaus, while her intended match, the son of Blackett's partner, is an idealistic sympathizer with the League of Nations and a vegetarian. Business may be booming—what with the war in Europe, the Allies are desperate for rubber and helpless to resist Blackett's price-fixing and market manipulation—but something is wrong. No one suspects that the world of the British Empire, of fixed boundaries between classes and nations, is about to come to a terrible end. A love story and a war story, a tragicomic tale of a city under siege and a dying way of life, The Singapore Grip completes the “Empire Trilogy” that began withTroubles and the Booker prize-winning Siege of Krishnapur.

The Empire Trilogy

The Empire Trilogy PDF Author: J.G. Farrell
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590174763
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 921

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Book Description
The Empire Trilogy--consisting of the Lost Booker Prize-winning Troubles, the Booker Prize-winning The Siege of Krishnapur,and The Singapore Grip--is Farrell's re-examination of the legacy, and limits, of British imperial rule. The three volumes, connected by theme rather than character, and above all by their shared wit, brio, and daring, range in setting from the India of the Great Mutiny of 1857, to Ireland immediately after the Great War, to the besieged Singapore of World War II. Together the books constitute not only a spectacular entertainment but also an ambitious refashioning of the traditional historical novel to meet the tragic realities of the modern world. · The Siege of Krishnapur - India, 1857--the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur, widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last fifty years.Farrell's story is set in an isolated Victorian outpost on the subcontinent. Rumors of strife filter in from afar, and yet the members of the colonial community remain confident of their military and, above all, moral superiority. But when they find themselves under actual siege, the true character of their dominion--at once brutal, blundering, and wistful--is soon revealed. · Troubles - 1919: After surviving the Great War, Major Brendan Archer makes his way to Ireland, hoping to discover whether he is indeed betrothed to Angela Spencer, whose Anglo-Irish family owns the once-aptly-named Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. But his fiancée is strangely altered and her family's fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline. The hotel's hundreds of rooms are disintegrating on a grand scale; its few remaining guests thrive on rumors and games of whist; herds of cats have taken over the Imperial Bar and the upper stories; bamboo shoots threaten the foundations; and piglets frolic in the squash court. Meanwhile, the Major is captivated by the beautiful and bitter Sarah Devlin. As housekeeping disasters force him from room to room, outside the order of the British Empire also totters: there is unrest in the East, and in Ireland itself the mounting violence of "the troubles." · The Singapore Grip - Singapore, 1939: life on the eve of World War II just isn't what it used to be for Walter Blackett, head of British Singapore's oldest and most powerful firm. No matter how forcefully the police break one strike, the natives go on strike somewhere else. His daughter keeps entangling herself with the most unsuitable beaus, while her intended match, the son of Blackett's partner, is an idealistic sympathizer with the League of Nations and a vegetarian. Business may be booming--what with the war in Europe, the Allies are desperate for rubber and helpless to resist Blackett's price-fixing and market manipulation--but something is wrong. No one suspects that the world of the British Empire, of fixed boundaries between classes and nations, is about to come to a terrible end.

Troubles

Troubles PDF Author: J.G. Farrell
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590170182
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
Winner of the Lost Man Booker Prize, this darkly hilarious book about the Irish war for independence takes place in a crumbling hotel on Ireland's west coast, a place where madness and brutality have begun to reign. 1919: After surviving the Great War, Major Brendan Archer makes his way to Ireland, hoping to discover whether he is indeed betrothed to Angela Spencer, whose Anglo-Irish family owns the once-aptly-named Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. But his fiancée is strangely altered and her family's fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline. The hotel's hundreds of rooms are disintegrating on a grand scale; its few remaining guests thrive on rumors and games of whist; herds of cats have taken over the Imperial Bar and the upper stories; bamboo shoots threaten the foundations; and piglets frolic in the squash court. Meanwhile, the Major is captivated by the beautiful and bitter Sarah Devlin. As housekeeping disasters force him from room to room, outside the order of the British Empire also totters: there is unrest in the East, and in Ireland itself the mounting violence of "the troubles." Troubles is a hilarious and heartbreaking work by a modern master of the historical novel.

English, August

English, August PDF Author: Upamanyu Chatterjee
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590171790
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Agastya Sen, known to friends by the English name August, is a child of the Indian elite. His friends go to Yale and Harvard. August himself has just landed a prize government job. The job takes him to Madna, “the hottest town in India,” deep in the sticks. There he finds himself surrounded by incompetents and cranks, time wasters, bureaucrats, and crazies. What to do? Get stoned, shirk work, collapse in the heat, stare at the ceiling. Dealing with the locals turns out to be a lot easier for August than living with himself. English, August is a comic masterpiece from contemporary India. Like A Confederacy of Dunces and The Catcher in the Rye, it is both an inspired and hilarious satire and a timeless story of self-discovery.

THE STORY OF CAWNPORE

THE STORY OF CAWNPORE PDF Author: CAPT. MOWBRAY THOMSON
Publisher: VICTORIA INSTITUTIONS
ISBN:
Category : Cawnpore
Languages : en
Pages : 81

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Book Description
This book can be downloaded as a PDF file from here.  Brutalities inherent in a feudal language social system This is another book that should necessarily be read by the citizens of the new nations of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. All false and fancy beliefs of a great and noble civilisation in their antiquity will evaporate into thin air. This book contains real incidences that took place during the so-called First War of Independence in India(?), the so-called Sepoy Mutiny. Sepoy Mutiny was just that. Just a mutiny in a small area of the Indian Peninsula and English-ruled India. It was not a national struggle against the English rule. The real reasons for this outbreak against a very noble class of rulers is never mentioned in the modern history books. The real reason was the sociological changes that the presence of the English race was creating in the peninsula. The very seeing of the physical attributes and dignified stances of the English individuals were making the lower class people here aware of the potential and possibilities of human dignity if allowed to improve without fetters. However, this kind of mental improvement in the lower classes can be quite ennerving to the higher feudal classes, who hold their serfs in the non-tangible, yet quite crushing claws of feudal language codes. These codes hold the lower classes in a level of dirt and indignity by a web of pejorative and ennobling words and usages. This makes the higher class conspire to make use of the very liberated classes to pull down their own benefactors. In fact, this is not the first time, the English side was made the butt of similar brutal massacres. In the TRAVANCORE STATE MANUAL written by a native official of the erstwhile Travancore kingdom located at the southern tip of the Indian peninsula another similar incident is mentioned. But the Pillamars and Madampimars (petty chiefs) resented this act of the Rani, and in November 1697 A.D., the factory of Anjengo was violently attacked on the plea that the English were pirates, but without success. Mr. Logan writes: — “It may however be doubted whether this, their ostensible reason, was the true one, for as will presently appear, the presence of the English in Travancore was gradually leading to a revolution in that State”

The Siege

The Siege PDF Author: Helen Dunmore
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802139580
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Called "elegantly, starkly beautiful" by "The New York Times Book Review, The Siege" is Dunmore's masterpiece. Her canvas is monumental--the Nazi's 1941 winter siege on Leningrad that killed 600,000--but her focus is heartrendingly intimate.

Zemindar

Zemindar PDF Author: Valerie Fitzgerald
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1781859531
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 868

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Book Description
An international bestseller and winner of the 1981 Georgette Heyer Historical Novel Prize, Zemindar is a magnificent, twisting love story, all unfolding against the tempestuous backdrop of the Indian Rebellion. Englishwoman Laura Hewitt accompanies her newly engaged cousin to India, first to Calcutta and then to the fabled fiefdom of Oliver Erskine, Zemindar – or hereditary ruler – of a private kingdom with its own army. But India is on the verge of the Mutiny, which will sweep them all up in its chaos... Praise for Zemindar: 'If you loved The Far Pavilions – and who didn't – this will be your dish too' Cosmopolitan 'Utterly addictive' Washington Post

J. G. Farrell

J. G. Farrell PDF Author: Lavinia Greacen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Pub Limited
ISBN: 9780747551904
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
In this full-length biography, Greacen disentangles not only the circumstances of the novelist's death by drowning, but also the story of his life and how it informed everything he wrote.