Product Description
From the Inside Flap
It was one of the defining moments of world history, but it had been brought about by a tiny number of people. Among them were Jawaharlal Nehru, the fiery Indian prime minister with radical plans for a socialist revolution; Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the Muslim leader who would stop at nothing to establish the world's first modern Islamic state; Mohandas Gandhi, the mystical figure who enthralled a nation; and Louis and Edwina Mountbatten, the glamorous but unlikely couple who had been dispatched to get Britain out of India without delay. Within hours of the midnight chimes, the two new nations of India and Pakistan would descend into anarchy and terror. Nehru, Jinnah, Gandhi and the Mountbattens struggled with public and private turmoil while their dreams of freedom and democracy turned to chaos, bloodshed, genocide and war.
Indian Summer depicts the epic sweep of events that ripped apart the greatest empire the world has ever seen, and saw one million people killed and ten million dispossessed. It reveals the secrets of the most powerful players on the world stage: the Cold War conspiracies, the private deals, and the intense and clandestine love affair between the wife of the last viceroy and the first prime minister of free India.
Steeped in the private papers and reflections of the participants, this is an extraordinary story of complex passions and divided loyalties. With wit, insight and a sharp eye for detail, Alex von Tunzelmann relates how a handful of people changed the world for ever.
From the Back Cover
`Indian Summer is a true tour de force: absorbing in its detail and masterly in the broad sweep of its canvas' SIR MARTIN GILBERT
`An engaging, controversial, very lively and, at times, refreshingly irreverent tour de force. Alex von Tunzelmann has written a dramatic story, laced with tragedy and farce, and done so very well. A remarkable debut' LAWRENCE JAMES, author of Raj: The Making of British India
`The partition of India and Pakistan is one of the key moments of the twentieth century, involving as it did the forced migration and massacre of untold numbers of people. Then as now, controversy dogged the issue and the main personalities, especially the last Viceroy of India, Lord Louis Mountbatten. Alex von Tunzelmann has produced a superb account of an event that still has the power to shock; her lucid and even-handed narrative guides us safely through the excitements and complexities of the period' TREVOR ROYLE, author of The Last Days of the Raj
`Alex von Tunzelmann is a wonderful historian, as learned as she is shrewd. But she is also something more unexpected: a writer with a wit and an eye for character that Evelyn Waugh would surely have admired' TOM HOLLAND
`Indian Summer is outstandingly vivid and authoritative. Alex von Tunzelmann brings a lively new voice to narrative history-writing' VICTORIA GLENDINNING
