The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire

✍ Scribed by Baker, Deborah

• Book ID: 110488257
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 418 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781555978044

✦ Synopsis

A sumptuous biographical saga, both intimate and epic, about the waning of the British Empire in India

John Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalayas. Michael Spender was the first to survey the northern approach to the summit of Mount Everest. While their younger brothers--W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender--achieved literary fame, they vied to be included on an expedition that would deliver Everest's summit to an Englishman, a quest that had become a metaphor for Britain's struggle to maintain power over India. To this rivalry was added another: In the summer of 1938 both men fell in love with a painter named Nancy Sharp. Her choice would determine where each man's wartime loyalties would lie.

Set in Calcutta, London, the glacier-locked wilds of the Karakoram, and on Everest itself, The Last Englishman is also the story of a generation. The cast of this exhilarating drama includes Indian and English writers and artists, explorers and...