The Last Englishmen

Love, War, and the End of Empire

By: Deborah Baker

Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart

John Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalayas. Michael Spender was the first to draw a detailed map of the North Face of Mount Everest. While their younger brothers - W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender - achieved literary fame, they vied to be included on an expedition that would deliver Everest's summit to an Englishman, a quest that had become a metaphor for Britain's struggle to maintain power over India. To this rivalry was added another: In the summer of 1938, both men fell in love with a painter named Nancy Sharp. Her choice would determine where each man's wartime loyalties would lie.

Set in Calcutta, London, the glacier-locked wilds of the Karakoram, and on Everest itself, The Last Englishmen is also the story of a generation. The cast of this exhilarating drama includes Indian and English writers and artists, explorers and Communist spies, Die Hards and Indian nationalists, political rogues and police informers. Key among them is a highborn Bengali poet named Sudhin Datta, a melancholy soul torn, like many of his generation, between hatred of the British Empire and a deep love of European literature, whose life would be upended by the arrival of war on his Calcutta doorstep.

©2018 Deborah Baker (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Difficult to Follow on Audio Book

Good book, too many different historical characters to be able to follow the story well on audio book.

Devoles into Tedium

Books lacks focus and covers so many historical characters on so many fronts from a small family who loses their parent, to mountaineers in the Himalayas, the division of post-war India, Bengal society, Ghandi. I could go on, but in between it devolves into the melodramatic failed marriages of the men and their women while some men were experimenting with their attraction to each other in Weimar Germany, What is going on? The tedium go to me. So many characters - I don't care what happpened to any of them. One of the worst histories I have ever sped read.