Paul Scott

The Day of the Scorpion is the 1968 novel by Paul Scott, the second in his Raj Quartet.

No set of novels so richly recreates the last days of India under British rule—"two nations locked in an imperial embrace"—as Paul Scott's historical tour de force, The Raj Quartet. The Jewel in the Crown opens in 1942 as the British fear both Japanese invasion and Indian demands for independence. On the night after …

Book III only of the Raj Quartet. A spectacular explosion of history set off within the lives of a dozen or so Britons and Indians on the edges of vast change. (New York Times)

The Raj Quartet, Paul Scott's epic study of British India in its final years, has no equal. Tolstoyan in scope and Proustian in detail but completely individual in effect, it records the encounter between East and West through the experiences of a dozen people caught up in the upheavals of the Second World War and …