The Raj Quartet – Volume 2

The Towers of Silence carries the quartet through the later war years, focusing on Barbie Batchelor, a retired missionary teacher whose friendship with the Layton household gives her an uneasy place inside the British community. Sarah Layton confronts the damage left by the Mayapore case, while Ronald Merrick continues to convert violence and insecurity into professional authority. Illness, grief and social cruelty expose a ruling class that can no longer reconcile its claims of duty with the consequences of its rule.

A Division of the Spoils moves from wartime service and demobilisation towards the transfer of power in 1947. Through Guy Perron and the surviving members of the Layton circle, earlier testimony is reconsidered as the British prepare to leave and India approaches Partition. The final novel connects the fate of individual relationships to the division of territory, property and political responsibility, ending the series with an empire dismantled but its habits and injuries still present in those who outlive it.