Description

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"I have not lately read a finer book than this—on any subject at all…A masterpiece." —Simon Winchester, New Statesman

The photographs of three young men had stood in his grandmother’s house for as long as he could remember, beheld but never fully noticed. They had all fought 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. 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 line. Manek, dashing and confident, was a pilot with India’s fledgling air force; gentle Ganny became an army doctor in the arid North-West Frontier. Bobby’s pursuit would carry him as far as the deserts of Iraq and the green hell of the Burma battlefront.

The years 1939–45 might be the most revered, deplored, and replayed in modern history. Yet India’s extraordinary role has been concealed, from itself and from the world. In riveting prose, Karnad retrieves the story of a single family—a story of love, rebellion, loyalty, and uncertainty—and with it, the greater revelation that is India’s Second World War.

Farthest Field narrates the lost epic of India’s war, in which the largest volunteer army in history fought for the British Empire, even as its countrymen fought to be free of it. It carries us from Madras to Peshawar, Egypt to Burma—unfolding the saga of a young family amazed by their swiftly changing world and swept up in its violence.

About the Author

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Raghu Karnad is an award-winning journalist who lives in Bangalore and New Delhi, India. His writing has appeared in Granta, the International New York Times, the Financial Times, the Caravan, and n+1.

Praise For…

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I wasn’t prepared for its extraordinary aesthetic qualities and emotional power, as well as its serene mastery of outsize, intransigent material.
— Pankaj Mishra - New York Times Book Review

Wonderfully generous, full of intelligence, compassion, curiosity and brilliant writing…[I]t has the stamp of imaginative truth about it and we can ask nothing more of any kind of writing.
— David Crane - Spectator

Fascinating…[A] poignant memorial to [Karnad’s] lost family and a gripping account of how India contributed to the allied victory and sowed the seeds of its independence.
— Ian Critchley - Sunday Times

[Karnad] writes with the imaginative gift of a first-rate novelist…[U]nforgettable.
— Juliet Nicolson - Telegraph

A bravura feat of literary-historical imagination…[M]oving, eloquent, intelligent.
— Neel Mukherjee - Financial Times

Raghu Karnad elegantly navigates through a world—and a history—that will be alien to many readers.
— Ed Timms - Dallas Morning News

This book tells us that we all have two deaths: when we die and when we are forgotten. But there is a possibility of two births, the second being re-created in an extraordinary book. This is one of those rare books that bring people alive again. It has been written with imagination and is engrossing to read.
— Michael Holroyd