(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

With a New Introduction by Hilary Spurling

The Raj Quartet, Paul Scott's epic study of British India in its final years, has no equal. Tolstoyan in scope and  Proustian in detail  but completely individual in effect, it records the encounter between East and West through the experiences of a dozen people caught up in the upheavals of the Second World War and the growing campaign for Indian independence from Britain.

The first novel, The Jewel in the Crown, describes the doomed love between an English girl and an Indian boy, Daphne Manners and Hari Kumar. This affair touches the lives of other characters in three subsequent volumes, most of them unknown to Hari and Daphne but involved in the larger social and political conflicts which destroy the lovers. In The Day of the Scorpion, Ronald Merrick, a sadistic policeman who arrested and prosecuted Hari, insinuates himself into an aristocratic British family as World War II escalates.

On occasions unsparing in its study of personal dramas and racial differences, the Raj Quartet is at all times profoundly humane, not least in the author’s capacity to identify with a huge range of characters. It is also illuminated by delicate social comedy and wonderful evocations of the Indian scene, all narrated in luminous prose.

The other two novels in the Raj Quartet, The Towers of Silence and A Division of the Spoils, are also available from Everyman’s Library.

“A major work, a glittering combination of brilliant craftsmanship, psychological perception and objective reporting.” –The New York Times

“An artful triumph. . . . [The Jewel in the Crown] goes forward with considerable power and urgency. . . . Besides storytelling, Mr. Scott uses his remarkable techniques to portray a place and a time, a society and its social arrangements, that are now history.” –The New Yorker

“Far more even than E.M. Forster, in whose long literary shadow he has to work, Paul Scott is successful in exploring the provinces of the human heart.” –Life

“The strength, assurance and stamina displayed in The Day of the Scorpion are quite outstanding. [Scott is a] writer who has thoroughly mastered his material, and who can . . . work through a maze of fascinating detail without for a moment losing sight of distant and considerable objectives.” –The Times Literary Supplement

“An epic of genius.” –Philadelphia Inquirer