“The Fallen opens in Abruzzo, autumn 1943, as Rana Ranjit Singh, a Sikh officer who escaped from an Indian Army POW camp, takes refuge in a remote farmhouse. The girl who finds him at the point of a pitchfork – 16-year-old Zola Sabatini – and her mother hide him through the German occupation. What grows between them is fierce and unspoken. When the Germans arrive at the farm, everything they have begun to build is broken in a single night. He writes to her for five years; she never replies. Now he is going back to find out why.”

My previous novel, Belonging (Myriad Editions, 2015) is set in India and Sussex between 1855 and 1919, it covers the story of three generations of a British colonial family in India. It begins just before the outbreak of The Indian Mutiny (as it’s known in Britain) or The War of Independence (as it’s known in India) when the whole of North India rose in rebellion against British rule, and ends just after the First World War, when around 1.5 million Indians volunteered to fight on the British side. Through the personal stories of the protagonists, the novel explores themes of racism and feminism and examines the effect of colonial oppression on both the oppressors and the oppressed.

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