Historical Fiction

Writing in Past Continuous

An interview with Sunjeev Sahota ♦ A version of this interview was originally published in India Today. By his own admission, British writer Sunjeev Sahota’s novels “tend to come down to a few brown people living in north England or India”. But within this framework, Sahota wove richly detailed lives and unique voices in his …

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Portrait of a lady

The last century of Mughal rule comes to life in The Mirror of Beauty, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s compelling picture of Delhi and its wider world ♦  View as PDF Beloved of poets and coveted by kings, conquered and constructed again and again, Delhi in its present avatar is a tough city to love. Yet many still …

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The Stranger’s Child

Alan Hollinghurst teases out the thoughts behind his character’s smallest actions ♦ The opening image would enchant any serious reader: a 16-year-old girl reading poetry in a hammock in an English garden. Her mind wanders from Tennyson to the impending visit of Cecil Valance, a poet and young nobleman who is her brother’s friend and, though …

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