1. Coromandel!
England, 1627. Jason Savage, an illiterate Wiltshire farm boy, becomes obsessed with a bloodstained map promising adventure and treasure far beyond the life laid out for him. Leaving home, he is drawn through London and onto the sea, beginning a journey that takes him into the…
2. The Deceivers
India, 1825. William Savage is an East India Company official responsible for a remote district when a murder inquiry exposes evidence of organised killing along the roads. His search leads him towards the Thuggee networks whose members conceal ritual murder beneath ordinary occupations and whose reach…
3. Nightrunners of Bengal
In 1857 Captain Rodney Savage serves with a Bengal Native Infantry regiment in the fictional city of Bhowani. Long accustomed to the routines and loyalties of the East India Company’s army, he finds those assumptions collapsing as mutiny becomes rebellion and military units, princely interests and…
4. The Lotus and the Wind
Afghanistan, 1879. Lieutenant Robin Savage is serving during the Second Anglo-Afghan War when an accusation of cowardice threatens his career. A dying Afghan’s cryptic reference to “Atlar” draws him into intelligence work at the point where the military campaign meets the wider Anglo-Russian contest for influence…
5. Far, Far the Mountain Peak
Beginning at Cambridge in 1902, Peter Savage decides that success must be achieved at any cost. He enters the Indian Civil Service and turns mountaineering into another arena for ambition, drawing friends, rivals and the woman he marries into a life organised around his determination to…
6. The Ravi Lancers
January 1914. The Ravi Lancers, a cavalry regiment maintained by a semi-independent Indian princely state, still live by traditions of personal loyalty to their ruler and by the elaborate hierarchies of mounted service. When war begins in Europe, the regiment is sent to France as part…
7. Bhowani Junction
India, 1946. Victoria Jones, an Anglo-Indian woman returning to the railway community in which she grew up, finds herself caught between identities as British rule approaches its end. Bhowani is tense with strikes, nationalist politics and communal uncertainty, while Colonel Rodney Savage is ordered to keep…
8. To the Coral Strand
India, 1948. A year after independence, former British Indian Army officer Rodney Savage is still trying to discover whether the country to which his family devoted generations can contain a place for him. He is reunited with Margaret Wood, a widowed missionary nurse whose own faith…