Farthest Field
Raghu Karnad
HarperCollins Publishers
The 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 Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, 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, but Raghu Karnad had not noticed until he was the same age as they were in their photo-frames. Then he learned about the Parsi boy from the sleepy south Indian coast, so eager to follow his brothers-in-law into the colonial forces and onto the front...