Top ten books about the aftermath of empire

Madeleine Bunting was for many years a columnist for the Guardian, which she joined in 1990. Bunting read History at Cambridge and Politics at Harvard. She is the author of many non-fiction books, including The Plot: A Biography of My Father's English Acre, which won the Portico Prize, and Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey, which was shortlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize and the Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year.

She has also written the novels Island Song and the newly released Ceremony of Innocence.

At the Guardian Bunting tagged ten of the best books about the aftermath of empire, including:

In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman

It’s hard not to write in superlatives of this extraordinary novel; it combines great intelligence (digressions on mathematics and philosophy) with a global story of love, alienation and belonging which moves vividly between South Kensington, the tiny excruciating details of Oxford racism and snobbery to the breathtaking drama of a catastrophic train crash in Bangladesh and on to the frenzied world of NGOs in Kabul in the wake of the Afghanistan invasion. Every paragraph takes you somewhere different – challenging you intellectually and emotionally with a sharp elegance: ”Everything seen by the west is seen through the west,” writes Rahman. There is no better guide to how empires don’t always end, more often simply changing shape and strategy to ensure continued dominance.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue