12 books like The Shadow Lines
The Glass Palace
Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel by Amitav Ghosh tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest.
When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love…
Shares: India, Domestic fiction
Smoke and Ashes
India, 1921. Haunted by his memories of World War I, Captain Sam Wyndham is battling a serious addiction to opium that he must keep secret from his superiors in the Calcutta police force. When Sam is summoned to investigate a grisly murder, he is stunned at the sight of the body: he's seen this before. Last night, in a drug addled haze, he stumbled across a corpse with the same ritualistic…
Shares: India, British
Plain tales from the hills
Originally written for the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette, the stories were intended for a provincial readership familiar with the pleasures and miseries of colonial life. For the subsequent English edition, Kipling revised the tales so as to recreate as vividly as possible the sights and smells of India for those at home. Yet far from being a celebration of Empire, Kipling's stories tell of…
Shares: India, British
The Pool in the Desert
A collection of stories by Sara Jeannette Duncan. In The Pool in the Desert, first published in 1903, Sara Jeannette Duncan explores the impact of isolation on the small British communities of Victorian India.
Shares: India, British
The Vanishing Act Of Esme Lennox
In Edinburgh in the 1930s, the Lennox family is having trouble with its youngest daughter. Esme is outspoken, unconventional and repeatedly embarrasses them in polite society. Something will have to be done. Years later, a young woman named Iris Lockhart receives a letter informing her that she has a great-aunt in a psychiatric unit who is about to be released. Iris has never heard of Esme…
Shares: India, Domestic fiction
The Painted Veil
A story of the beautiful but love-starve Kitty Fane who is forced to accompany her husband to the heart of a cholera epidemic. She is compelled by her awakening conscience to reassess her life and learn how to love.
Shares: British, Domestic fiction
The Quiet American
One of Graham Greene's best works. The story is set at the time of the French war against the Viet Cong and tells the story of liberal British journalist Thomas Fowler, his mistress Phuong, and their relationship with American idealist Pyle. The latter is an earnest young man indocrinated with geo-political theory and whose attempts to shape the world to American ideals ends in his own personal…
Shares: Political Fiction, British
Look Homeward, Angel
An elaborate and moving coming-of-age story about Eugene Gant, a restless and energetic character whose passion to experience life takes him from his small, rural hometown in North Carolina to Harvard University and the city of Boston. The novel's pattern is artfully simple--a small town, a large family, high school and college--yet the characters are monumental in their graphic individuality and…
Shares: Boys, Domestic fiction
Jim the boy
A fatherless ten-year-old boy comes of age in a Depression-era, southern farming community in this charming and humorous debut novel.A New York Times Notable Book of the Year"Rich and satisfying . . . A novel that perfectly captures the innocence and confusion and wonder of childhood." —Chicago TribuneHailed as one of those rare works with the power to enchant readers of all ages, this luminous…
Shares: Boys, Domestic fiction
Empire of the Sun
A fictionalized account of the author's experiences as a boy in Shanghai, China, during the Second World War, and in Lunghua C.A.C. (Civilian Assembly Centre), where he was interned from 1942 to 1945.
Shares: Boys, British
Folly and Glory
"As this finale opens, Tasmin and her family are under irksome, though comfortable, arrest in Mexican Santa Fe. Her father, the eccentric Lord Berrybender, is planning to head for Texas with his whole family and his retainers, English, American and Native American. Tasmin, who would once have followed her husband, Jim Snow, anywhere, is no longer even sure she likes him, or knows where to go…
Shares: British, Domestic fiction
By Sorrow's River
Raising her young son, Monty, Tasmin Berrybender hopes to turn him into an English gentleman despite his life on the trail toward Santa Fe, an endeavor that is compromised by painful occurrences in the lives of Tasmin's husband and father.
Shares: British, Domestic fiction