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Item Description

FIRST EDITION. 8vo. 8.75 x 5.5 inches. [vi] + 249 pp. Bound in original black cloth, gilt, in pictorial dust wrapper (by Jonny Hannah). A very good copy. Signed by author on title page. Decorated by publisher's device on title page. The locals call it 'The India house'. In 1956 three generations of women live in a house trying to hold the modern world at bay. The grandmother dreams of the lost Raj of India, the daughter employs a tutor to teach her daughter only a bizarre mixture of mythology, history, the Romantic Poets, arithmetic, French, and the perils of socialism and to cut out objectionable news from the Times. But it is just before the Suez crisis and two men, the son and grandson, arrive at the house and the fragile paradise the women have constructed is about to be changed forever In this blackly comic novel the past is richly evoked, but its message of colonial ambition and disaster and of love and corruption are both moving and timely (adapted from blurb). By William Palmer (b. 1945), novelist and poet.