Beyond all frontiers

by Emma Drummond

Set in India at the time of the Raj, Beyond All Frontiers is a mesmerizing historical novel that seems to sum up an entire era through the lives of its characters. The story of a resourceful, courageous woman, Charlotte Scott, it is also the story of Britain's first war with Afghanistan, which ended with a brutal massacre in the Khyber Pass. And it is a novel about the Empire: how the British gained it - and why they would lose it at last. Returning to India in 1837 after a sheltered childhood in England, seventeen year old Charlotte Scott finds not a loving mother but a cold, beautiful woman dismayed because her plain daughter cares more for politics and good works than for husband-hunting and frivolity. Charlotte finds her intelligence and sensitivity have no place in the peculiar world of the British army station, where full-dress balls and cricket matches are held amid Indian dust, heat, and sqaulor. Only one person truly befriends her: the athletic, handsome, unpretentious Richard