Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire

"Partition is a very complicated story. Many people have tried to tell it before, but this is far and away the best book I’ve read on Partition. I don’t think she had particular access to any brand-new material. She certainly didn’t get her hands on the material she would most have liked, the love letters between Nehru and Lady Mountbatten [wife of Lord Mountbatten, last Viceroy of India]. Because she does two things at once: she’s telling the love story of Mountbatten and Nehru – this extraordinary love triangle at the close of British India – and the extraordinary end to 300 years of what was often extremely violent imperial conquest. To have it ending with India’s first independent prime minister falling in love with the wife of the last viceroy – it’s an utterly amazing and extraordinary story. It’s not terribly clear whether their love was consummated at the time, although most people tend to believe that it probably was consummated at some point later. Exactly. Most of the books on Partition are pretty heavy going. There were long periods of meetings, missions … it makes for quite clumpy reading. Although you are obviously dealing with an epic turning-point in history, the path to it is so tortuous it doesn’t naturally lend itself to narrative history, yet she’s managed to do it. For a woman who was, what, two years out of college, it’s an enormous achievement."