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Start giftingThe Last Englishmen
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreJohn Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalayas. Michael Spender was the first to draw a detailed map of the North Face of Mount Everest. While their younger brothers—W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender—achieved literary fame, they vied to be included on an expedition that would deliver Everest's summit to an Englishman, a quest that had become a metaphor for Britain's struggle to maintain power over India. To this rivalry was added another: In the summer of 1938 both men fell in love with a painter named Nancy Sharp. Her choice would determine where each man's wartime loyalties would lie.
Set in Calcutta, London, the glacier-locked wilds of the Karakoram, and on Everest itself, The Last Englishmen is also the story of a generation. The cast of this exhilarating drama includes Indian and English writers and artists, explorers and Communist spies, Die Hards and Indian nationalists, political rogues and police informers. Key among them is a highborn Bengali poet named Sudhin Datta, a melancholy soul torn, like many of his generation, between hatred of the British Empire and a deep love of European literature, whose life would be upended by the arrival of war on his Calcutta doorstep.
Deborah Baker is the author of Making a Farm; In Extremis, which was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography; A Blue Hand; and The Convert, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in India and New York.
James Cameron Stewart trained at Hull University and the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Some theater highlights of his thirty-six-year career include Frank-n-Furter (The Rocky Horror Show), Thenadier (Les Miserables), the poet Philip Larkin in Larkin with Women (Best Actor nominee, MEN Awards 2005), and originating the part of Hamish in Sir Alan Ayckbourn's Things We Do for Love. In 2008 he published his grandfather's World War I memoirs and toured his one-man show based on them from 2008 to 2011. His television/film credits include Outlander, Jericho, Flying Blind, Golden Years, Emmerdale, London's Burning, Eastenders, Coronation Street, Holby City, and Taggart. He often appears on Radio 4, and is a regular presenter on the weekly The Economist podcast. James loves recording audiobooks and is delighted to have had the opportunity to narrate such a variety of magnificent authors, from Seneca through Max Hastings and Antony Beevor, to superlative fiction by J. M. Coetzee, Michael Dibdin, Stuart MacBride, and more. James's upbringing alternated between the Home Counties and the Isle of Skye. In addition to being an actor, he is a nutritional therapist, a keen sailor, and is at his happiest when flying his hot-air balloon.