The Towers of Silence — Paul Scott

Third in the epic quartet about the end of the Raj: “Scott throws us into India, wretched and beautiful . . . His contribution to literature is permanent.” -- The New York Times Book Review

India, 1943: In a regimental hill station, the ladies of Pankot struggle to preserve the genteel façade of British society amid the debris of a vanishing empire and World War II. A retired missionary, Barbara Batchelor, bears witness to the connections between many human dramas -- the love between Daphne Manner and Hari Kumar; the desperate grief an old teacher feels for an India she cannot rescue; and the cruelty of Captain Ronald Merrick, Susan Layton's future husband.

This is the third novel in the Raj Quartet, a series of 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).

“Scott has the trick of being sympathetic without ever losing his clearsightedness.” -- Times Literary Supplement