Kohima, 1944. At the edge of an empire, a war is drawing near.
Henry Blackford has spent twenty years in India and much of that time in the remote Naga Hills, where he is now Deputy Commissioner. He has built a life here: a bungalow and garden, even a tennis court, friendships and loyalties he believes he understands, and an abiding faith, however complicated, in the British order he represents. But beyond the hills, the Japanese army is advancing. As rumours of invasion become certainty, Kohima is dangerously unprepared, and Blackford finds himself struggling to make the military authorities understand what is coming: potential annihilation. It is not just a colonial outpost at risk, but the ancient Naga way of life. Around him, too, other certainties are beginning to shift. India is moving inexorably towards independence; among the Nagas, their own pursuit of freedom and self-determination is gathering momentum.
And Blackford, who has begun to question time-honoured axioms and to believe himself different from the colonial men around him, is forced to confront the limits of his own understanding. Then there is Darcie Wallace, the Scottish matron whose unexpected presence unsettles a man who has spent a lifetime keeping disorder at bay. And Lhusihu, Blackford’s Naga translator and driver, a descendant of head-hunters, with a moral authority Blackford can only envy.
Inspired by the true story of the Battle of Kohima, A Peculiar Kind of Englishman is a sweeping yet intimate novel of war, love and loyalty, and of the contradictions of empire. At its heart is a question that reaches far beyond the battlefield: how well can we ever know a place, a people, or ourselves, when the world that has shaped us is coming to an end?
