When Paul Scott was awarded Britain's premier literary award for fiction, the Booker Prize, in 1977 for his last novel, Staying On, it signified belated recognition for a writer who had been producing a distinguished series of novels for twenty-five years, with very little attention from the British literary establishment. His greatest achievement, The Raj Quartet, a tetralogy of interconnected novels, which was followed by a short sequel, Staying On, was published between 1966 and 1977 and brought him the wide following that has steadily grown since his death in 1978. The Raj Quartet provides a unique insight into British and Indian society at the time of Indian independence in 1947, and these powerful, slow-paced novels with their detailed, concrete world pose questions about the nature of the British Empire and of British society that had not been asked since E. M. Forster's A Passage to India in 1924.

Although readers of Scott's novels...