The gripping story of a world—and a family—at war. The Rowlands, powerful and rich, are at the centre of British high society, but they are blind to the changes that the Great War will bring. For the younger Rowlands, the excitement of war becomes a bloody reality in the mud-filled trenches of Flanders. For the older generation left at home, they must learn to swim with the new tide or face total ruin. But this isn't just a war for the upper classes. The Strattons, who have worked in the Rowland's factories for two generations, find themselves fighting with them as shells explode and death surrounds them. The war will prove a great leveller, one that could bring the aristocracy down, and lift the working classes up. Not only class will be put to the test, for, when all the men are gone, it is time for women to enter the work force, taking the roles thought to have been impossible and improper for them in the past. First published in 1979, Now, God Be...

New Year's Eve, 1856. As Captain Rodney Savage of the 13th Rifles, Bengal Native Infantry, celebrates the start of 1857 with his wife and friends in the isolated cantonment of Bhowani, news comes of a crisis that will have terrifying and widespread repercussions: the Rajah of the neighbouring native state of Kishanpur has been assassinated, and the Rani has had thirty-five of the culprits garrotted. With unrest mounting, the British have no option but to send troops to protect her and her young son. In the following months, as tension erupts into violence and the British begin to wonder whether even their closest servents are trustworthy, Rodney has good cause to remember the quiet comment of Caroline Langford, a visitor from England: 'India is your palace, but you live shut up in little rooms like the Bhowani Cantonment, and the next English room is always away at the other end of the palace somewhere.' Combining the flare of a true story-teller with an intuitive sense of history born of his own deep knowledge and love of India, John Masters re-creates the horror of the Indian Mutiny that was to mark the end of British complacency in the huge sub-continent which they had thought their own. Never again would they feel so secure amid a native population that vastly outnumbered them. The seeds of discontent had been sown, to bear fruit ninety years later in India's painfully won independence. John Masters was a general in the British Army and served on the North-West frontier.

In the humid warmth of the jungle a dark group of people gather huddled about a flickering, dying fire,... ' She has returned ... a part of one leg was found before dusk today... Another spoke - "Her power over the mind and flesh is stronger than gold. By that she will lead them on. She has already captivated, them' - 'Is she, then, evil?" "No. But where she comes from, and must return to - there are the evil powers, which she will release, unknowing.' The darkness vibrates, shapes take form and a cloud hides the lace of the moon. 'What can we do? one cries - 'We are mortal' 'It is the duty laid upon us, as well as for our own preservation... we cannot prevail by strength. Greed makes men blind-the more gold, the more blind... SHE can beckon and lead them, but greed, fear, jealousy and ambition can be stronger. These we can create among them.' 'All that we have, and are, and can be, all that we know and guess and feel-we will use...'

John Masters came to the United States following a military career with a Ghurka regiment on India's Northwest frontier and as a serving officer (ultimately brigadier) with Orde Wingate's Chindits in Burma. (See "Bugles and a Tiger" and "The Road Past Mandalay.")The story of how he becomes both an American and a best=selling novelist ("Bhowani Junction" was the first of a large number of books) makes for interesting reading.REVIEWMasters life changed from that of a professional soldier in the British Indian Army to that of a succesful noveslist and screenwriter. He also became an avid Giants (baseball) fan. His book is the best account of the process of Americanization and success that I've read. The third in a trilogy, it is a wonderful book.

In his new novel John Masters returns to an old love, the Indian Army, but chooses a new setting: the trenches of Flanders in the early months of the Great War. The Ravi Lancers are an anomaly, the private regiment of an Indian prince, serving with the British. Their new commanding officer, Warren Bateman, a seconded Indian cavalryman, is determined to mould the regiment into a first-class fighting force, although like all the best officers of the old Indian Army he is sympathetic to his men. They, though, owe their allegiance to the second-in-command, Prince Krishna Ram, the Rajah's heir and a demi-god. It was Krishna's anglophile enthusiasm which brought the Lancers to the Western Front. But once there bitter conflict becomes inevitable. The tension between these two men moves to a more personal level when, during leave in England, Krishna has a passionate affair with Warren's sister, while Warren learns of his wife's unfaithfulness with another man. Private and military pressures combine to harden and embitter Bateman. He becomes a tyrant to his men, suppressing their traditions and religious customs, without which they are more than ever demoralised. Only one living writer could have done justice to this subject: the clash between two men and their women; between two sorts of military tradition; between infinitely different cultures. As before in John Masters's novels East and West do meet, but the result is as tragic as it is poignant. The Ravi Lancers is a magnificent and moving novel: as powerful as anything its author has ever written.

John Masters evokes the tensions and conflicts that accompanied the birth of modern India in his classic novel Bhowani Junction. Set in the late 1940's in the wake of partition it has become one of the great novels of India, alongside E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and the work of Paul Scott and Salman Rushdie. In the last hectic days of the British Raj, as the British prepare to withdraw from India, Victoria has to choose between marrying a British Army officer or a Sikh, Ranjit, as she struggles to find her place in the new India that is emerging.

When William Savage brings his new bride back to Madhya, the Indian town that he governs for the Honourable East India Company, his greatest fear is his ability to satisfy his young wife and live up to her father's expectations. But on their first night in Madhya, William witnesses a terrible mass murder, which will lead him into the darkest depths of human nature. Finding the murderers is now his highest priority, but without the support of his superiors, there is little officially that he can do. William must choose whether to safeguard his career or to defy orders, and find the murderers at any cost. But this is bigger than he at first suspected. If he wants to find justice, he must first go amongst the murderers, and become one of them.First published 1952, The Deceivers, whilst a work of fiction, draws inspiration from a real murderous cult, the 'Thuggees', who stalked the roads of India for hundreds of years, murdering millions of people, until they were...

January 1 1916: Europe is bleeding to death as the corpses rot from Poland to Gallipoli in the cruel grip of the Great War...Heart of War follows the fate and fortunes of the Rowland family and those people bound up in their lives: the Cate squirearchy, the Strattons who manage the Rowland owned factory, and the humble, multi-talented Gorse family. In this all-consuming conflict, not a single family will remain untouched. With Quentin and Boy Rowland fighting in the trenches and Guy flying the skies above, it would be a miracle for the whole family to come home untouched...During the years 1916 and 1917, the appalling slaughter of the Somme and Passchendaele cuts deep into the hearts of British people as military conscription looms over Britain for the first time in a thousand years. As babies are born, fathers, sons and brothers killed, and women strike out in the work-place, Britain looks to never be the same again.

It is 1881 and Britain and Russia face each other across the North West Frontier. The prize is that great jewel of Asia which Britain treasures and Russia covets - India - and in between lie the deserts of Afghanistan, Persia, Turkestan... Under stigma of coward ice in action, a young Gurkha officer, Robin Savage, is sent as a spy to uncover a Russian plan of invasion. He follows the trail of a murdered agent thousands of miles over plains, mountains and lonely deserts where the merest whisper seems an intrusion... where only a man like Savage, whose strange affinity for solitude cuts himoff fro in his follow men, could ever feel at home...

The first chapter in the saga of the Savage family in India.'A fast and vivid adventure' (Sunday Times), in which Jason Savage, a farm-boy in seventeenth-century Wiltshire, makes his way to the legendary coast of Coromandel in search of the treasure of Meru.

The first member of the Savage family to reach India stepped ashore on the coral strand of ''Coromandel!' in the year 1628. From that date, for 319 years, the Savages were bound to India by an ever- strengthening chain of event and emotion, of incident and accident, of power and sacrifice. Of all this John Masters has written in The Deceivers, Nightrunners of Bengal, The Lotus and the Wind, Far, Far the Mountain Peak, and Bhowani Junction. The events of Bhowani Junction took place in 1946 and the protagonist, Rodney Savage, then stood on the threshold of the great change which was to come over India the following year--largely as a result of the work of himself and his forebears. Now he must sail away, finally, from the soil which over the generations has become a part of his being. But he can no more leave India, on command, than a man can walk away and leave his heart. On the surface, therefore, this is the exciting story of one man's efforts to find terms on which he can live with the new India and his own pride. Yet he fails. With the certainty of an event already recorded in the history books we know that for all his genius, for all the passion of his struggle, he will be crushed--and, as we watch, he is. Then begins a new struggle in which Rodney Savage is not the protagonist but the prize: the struggle of a woman to remake this broken, defeated man, who sees himself only as the last of the line, the fourteenth generation of Savages to serve in India.

Towering over the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayan mountain range was the proud, virgin summit of Meru - twenty- seven thousand and forty feet of icy splendour which had stood unchallenged since time immemorial, until, in the spring of 1913, a man led his party to begin the long, perilous climb to the top...The man was Peter Savage, and all his life he had betted against ridiculous odds - taken decisions where others had hesitated Friends both loved and feared him - would do anything in their power to help him. Now Savage wanted Meru, and no matter what it cost, he was determined to win the battle between the mountain and the man...“The account of the assault on Meru is a magnificent piece of descriptive writing... Mr. Masters writes from such a wonderfully rich experience of life that he could not be dull or insignificant if he tried.”-Sunday Times“An immensely readable novel with a wide sweep and superb action sequences on the frozen mountain slopes, in the trenches of Flanders, in the stricken Indian town!’-Evening Standard

1918 dawns desolate over the fields of Flanders. Decimated by the worst war the world has ever seen, neither British nor German troops can break the deadlock of the trenches. After four years of murderous stalemate, peace seems buried for ever. But finally, one by one, the guns fall silent...By the Green of the Spring relives the last terrible months of the Great War and the uneasy, exhausted peace which followed it. From the North-West Frontier to the war in France and the civil war in Ireland, John Masters follows the fortunes of four Kent families—the Cates, the Rownlands, the Strattons and the Gorses—through the cataclysm that ended the golden Edwardian dream for ever.By the Green of the Spring, first published in 1981, is the third, self-contained volume of the Loss of Eden trilogy, a magnificent conclusion to an enthralling epic of war and peace by a major contemporary novelist.