|
|
Farthest Field: An Indian Story Of The Second World War![]() Stock informationGeneral Fields
Special Fields
DescriptionThe debut of a brilliant young writer, Farthest Field tells the lost history of India's Second World War narrated through the joys and tragedies of a single family, the author's own. If you loved The English Patient or Rohinton Mistry's Fine Balance or Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, you will love this book. Three young men gazed at him from silver-framed photographs in his grandmother's house, 'beheld but not noticed, as angels are in a frieze full of mortal strugglers'. They had all been in the Second World War, a fact that surprised him. Indians had never figured in his idea of the war, nor the war in his idea of India - and he thought that he had a good idea of both. One of them, Bobby, even looked a bit like him, now he looked at this young man from the sleepy south Indian coast, with a sense of adventure and opportunity gleaming from his eyes, so eager to follow his brothers-in-law into the army - and onto the front lines of India's Second World War. Bobby's dashing friend Manek was serving as a pilot and Ganny, married to Bobby's sister Nugs, as a doctor battling both his asthma and his medical duties high in the mountains of the North-West frontier. Author descriptionRaghu Karnad was born in Mumbai in 1983 and studied political science at Swarthmore College, PA and at Oxford, where he took a first. In New Delhi, he worked for two national news weeklies, Outlook and Tehelka, writing articles that won prizes including the European Commission's Lorenzo Natali Award, and the Press Institute of India Prize for reporting on conflict. He was editor of Time Out Delhi until 2011. He has written for the Financial Times and Granta in London, the journal n+1 in New York, the Caravan in New Delhi and other publications. His essay describing the origins of this book was runner up in the Financial Times-Bodley Head essay prize and was described by judge Simon Schama as 'nothing short of brilliant'. Farthest Field is his first book. He lives in Bangalore, India. |