4 weeks, 2 days ago

Book Review | Quirky epic set in WW2 Calcutta

On page 450, exactly halfway through Great Eastern Hotel, Ruchir Joshi’s 900-page behemoth of a historical novel, I stopped reading the book to assess what I felt about it. The setting had been fully and brilliantly established: Calcutta between the years 1942 and 1946, beginning with Rabindranath Tagore’s death and vaguely ending with the Bengal famine, complete with the fear of a Japanese invasion as World War II drew closer and closer to British India, with Calcutta being target No. A wonderful cast of main characters had been introduced, consisting of Nirupama, a young communist, Kedar from a family well off enough to attend parties with India’s British overlords, Imogen, a British woman bored witless in Calcutta after experiencing the war firsthand in France, Jeremy Lambert, an air force man stuck behind a desk as part of a secret intelligence organisation, and Gopal, a pickpocket just ‘promoted’ to black marketeer by his gang leader. But having finished the thriller, I hadn’t so much wanted to get back into the world of Great Eastern Hotel as I’d needed to inhabit those pages again.

Deccan Chronicle
British Book Review Quirky Great Eastern Hotel Ww2 Calcutta

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