After reading ElCicco’s review of this, I went right out and got myself a copy, and I was not disappointed! Set in Calcutta, 1837, The East India Company is in full swing. Xavier Mountstuart, a most celebrated English poet and author, has gone missing. Mountstuart is the hero of William Avery, our narrator, who is a junior officer who is drowning in homesickness and debt–and whose best friend has just died mysteriously. He is sent by the Company as a companion to a Mr. Jeremiah Blake to find […]
Joseph Conrad Meets Graham Greene
The Strangler Vine was long listed for the 2014 Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and the description — historical fiction set in early 19th-century India featuring a green soldier, a wizened political operative and Thuggees — made it sound too good to pass up. Images of Indiana Jones came to mind, but Carter offers her readers so much more than that pulpy comic-booky fare. Trained as a journalist, she delivers a meticulously researched political novel that reminded me of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and […]