Skip to main content
Thumbnail for Burma sahib : a novel

Burma sahib : a novel

Theroux, Paul2024
Books
Before George Orwell was Orwell - the pen name he took on becoming a writer - he was Eric Blair, an unlikely policeman in Burma. 19 years old, unusually tall, highly intelligent, a diffident loner fresh from Eton, Blair stood out amongst his fellow trainees in 1920s Mandalay. It was here, over five years in the narrow colonial world of the Raj - a decaying system steeped in overt racism and petty class-conflict - that Eric Blair became the George Orwell we know: an anti-imperialist, a socialist and a writer of rare commitment. The inner journey he made in these years is remarkable, but in the absence of letters or diaries from the period, this richly complex transformation can only be told in fiction, as it is here by Paul Theroux, in one of his most striking and accomplished novels.
Main title:
Burma sahib : a novel / Paul Theroux.
Author:
Imprint:
UK : Hamish Hamilton, 2024.
Collation:
390 pages : map (black and white) ; 24 cm
Notes:
Originally published: New York: Mariner Books.
ISBN:
9780241633342 (hbk)
Dewey class:
813.54
Language:
English
BRN:
1357925
View my active saved list
0 items in my active saved list