The setting sun

Memoirs that connect a personal story to the larger world are a tough nut to crack. The writer must combine the immediacy of a personal narrative with the expository needed to provide background for a very foreign setting.

This story written by a scholar of colonial literature of a university in London. His father served in the last decades of the Raj in colonial India.

This is a non-fiction book detailing a son's search for his real father; but it is also much much more. It is an intimate portrayal of life in colonial Africa, as well as a reconstruction of life in the Raj shortly before partition.