Book Information

Rajkumar is only a boy, helping out on a market stall in the dusty square outside the royal palace in Mandalay, when the British force the Burmese King, Queen and court into exile. Thus begins The Glass Palace, a novel that not only grasps the reach and fall of empires across the twentieth century, but also maps with unerring skill the rival geography of the human heart. In the upheaval that follows the British arrival in Mandalay and the shattering of the kingdom of the Glass Palace, Rajkumar, a stateless orphan in a tattered lunghi, is lifted on the tides of chaos deep into the teak forests of upper Burma. There, with the help of an itinerant merchant from Malachi, he will make his fortune. Yet he is haunted by the vision of Dolly, a child attendant of the royal entourage being escorted under armed guard into exile in India. So, now adult and wealthy, he leaves Burma to find her. Through the intertwining stories of Dolly and Rajkuman, the history of the twentieth century is told across three generations, spread over three interlinked parts of the British Empire: Burma, with its conflicting undercurrents of discontent: Malaya, with its vast rubber plantations, and India, amid growing opposition to British rule. Here too is the story of Dolly, bound to the magisterial Queen Supayalat, and her ill-fated struggle to maintain the standard of a vanished court while living in exile in the small Indian district town of Ratnagiri. Through Arjun, an Indian officer and soldier of the Empire, the story moves into another generation, one caught in the crossfire between old loyalties and new aspirations. With World War II and the terrifying arrival of the Japanese juggernaut, Rajkumar is again set adrift. In an ocean of refugees fleeing war and devastation, he and his family make a treacherous one thousand-mile trek across the border to India. The door to Burma closes behind them and the glittering light of an extraordinary civilisation is at last extinguished.