Lee Langley

A café in Madrid. From her table across the room a solitary woman watches an attractive couple share breakfast morning after morning and speculates pleasurably about their relationship. One day they fail to appear and as time passes she feels a deepening sense of loss. Later she learns that the man has been murdered, stabbed to death in the street — an apparently senseless crime. The tragedy of the happy couple touches and disturbs her. Then, almost accidentally, she finds herself becoming involved with the widow and the dead man’s best friend. At first all is straightforward: loss, grieving, consolation. Gradually the relationship becomes more complex: she begins an affair with the friend, recognising that she is little more than a stopgap in his life.

When Julia Blackburn and her Dutch husband Herman move into an old village house perched on a cliff high above the Italian Ligurian Riviera they become part of a dwindling community in a landscape of forests and deserted villages with roofless ruins almost swallowed up by the riotous undergrowth. Seven hundred peasants once occupied this mountainous terrain, scraping a pitiful living; shepherds, chestnut farmers, cheese-makers — mezzadri, ‘half-people’, handing over half of everything, down to their last kilo of olives, to the padrone who was virtually their feudal lord; also sharing, when required, their women. They got by on a diet mainly of chestnuts — eaten raw, boiled, roasted, ground into flour, supplemented by an occasional thrush or dormouse.

Between the Assassinations is to summer reading what Slum-dog Millionaire was to feelgood movies: the book, like the film, beneath a deceptively beguiling surface, is a Dickensian-dark view of child labour, corruption, poverty, and ruthless privilege in modern India. Aravind Adiga won the Man Booker prize with his first novel, The White Tiger, a savage picture of modern India seen through the eyes of a murderous entrepreneur hell-bent on power and success. Between the Assassinations sometimes reads like a prelude to that book: from the variously hopeless lives we encounter in these stories could have emerged the appalling yet dazzling anti-hero of Tiger.

Empires of the Indus, by Alice Albinia When Alice Albinia set off for the source of the Indus she was not embarking on a quest for the unknown: she knew where the river rises. She wanted to start her journey at its mouth, the delta on the Arabian Sea, to travel upstream to Tibet and tell the story of the river which gives India its name. Empires of the Indus covers a 2,000-mile journey and 5,000 years of history. Albinia’s prize-winning first book is a personal odyssey through landscape and time, fed by scholarship. Her pages resonate with great names: Timur, Genghis Khan, Alexander, Aurangzeb. But before that we have the conquest of Sindh, the botched finale of the British Raj, Independence, and the horrors of Partition.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, by Paul Theroux When Paul Theroux set off from Victoria Station in 1973 his plan was to cross Europe and Asia, taking as many trains as he needed to get him to Tokyo, returning on the Trans-Siberian Express. From the four-month journey came a travel book that was not quite what he intended: ‘I sought trains. I found passengers.’ The Great Railway Bazaar sold 1.5 million copies in 20 languages. Thirty-three years and 40-odd books later, Theroux — ‘twice as old as the person who had ridden those trains’ — set off again, travelling in his own footsteps to see how much he and the world had changed.

The unending journey of this book takes Mark Tully from slums to skyscrapers as he explores the past, present and future not only of the subcontinent but of society, both eastern and western; how democracy is facing up to fundamentalism — Hindu, Muslim and an atheism he scathingly labels ‘aggressive secularism’. The Dawkins camp would not be welcome in his compound. There was a time when Tully was the most famous Englishman in India — ‘What does Tully Sahib say?’ the man on the village charpoy would ask when political or economic upheaval loomed. Tully’s mellifluous voice filled the airwaves for the 22 years he ran the BBC’s New Delhi bureau, trusted and loved by his millions of listeners.

The Moghul monarchs’ way of life was an extravaganza of such breathtaking splendour that in comparison the Sun King’s Versailles seems understated. Both Shah Jahan and Louis XIV came to the throne in 1643 and their courts had much in common: architectural grandeur, luxury, a love of jewels and a flair for excess. What was unique to the Muslim emperor was his devotion to a consort throughout their long marriage. Her death in childbirth and his desire to create a worthy mausoleum resulted in what many consider the most beautiful building in the world — the Taj Mahal.

The front cover shows a mature English beauty in an Oriental doorway, elegant in a turban, with twinset and pearls. On the back is a Country Life portrait of a radiant English rose. Both are Ann Allestree, who for 30 years supped at the high table of grand society, travelled, and set down her impressions. Seize the Day is an insider’s view of the wilder reaches of privilege. She met ambassadors, Eastern potentates, and enduring stars — Freya Stark, Harold Acton, Rebecca West. English eccentrics wander through her pages — barmy lords, batty old ladies, posh grotesques to set a Marxist drooling. Lord Binning invites her to dinner, and waves her into the kitchen ‘over a large pool of blood’, having just eviscerated a deer whose liver he intends to serve.

Christine Brooke-Rose is not an easy read. She is a sublime roller- coaster: hold on and hurtle with her — the ride will be exhilarating. She is dark, despairing, but her bleakness is Beckettian, the laughs never far away. Now 83, she lives in France, near Avignon. Born in Geneva (British father), she has written 12 novels (four of which are collected in the Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus), worked as a critic and academic, teaching English language and literature in Paris, been claimed by the French as a nouveau-romancier, a membership she rejects like all other memberships. Perhaps her staunch stand-alone path has led to her status as both eminent and little known.

This is a French novel, a very French novel. The author won the Prix Goncourt for an earlier book and this one carries hints of Voltaire and Sartre. The publishers suggest that Piano can be read as a metaphor of life and death, heaven and hell; Dante is invoked. Daunting stuff, you might think. A thin book, it comes wrapped in heavyweight literary packaging — in France Jean Echenoz is rated alongside Beckett and Nabokov. But what lies inside this intellectual bombe surprise is a sharp, airy sorbet that slips down with great ease: an existential thriller of the sort that might once have been turned into a movie by Jean Cocteau. It’s a deadpan, elegant and wittily observed tragicomedy: posh French fun.

Reading Maharanis has something of the poignant pleasure of rummaging in the attic of a great house fallen into desuetude: here are reminders of another age. Princesses stroll in their gardens in the Indian moonlight, fireflies flickering like stars, or roller-skate gaily through their marble palaces, saris billowing, with a staff of 400 to keep the place in order. We share the sense of loss Browning discerned in a Venice deprived of splendour ‘when the kissing had to stop’. Think of them dressing for dinner on a tiger hunt in the jungle (white tie and tails, evening gowns and emeralds) while a 35-piece band played in the dining tent. Back at the palace, guests chose their preferred mode of transport for the following day: ‘horse, elephant or Rolls-Royce’.