30th State

We will be India's thirtieth state, and I, madam speaker, will be the last prime minister of England.' With just eighteen words, Mark Richardson ends a thousand years of English history. The Indian prime minister makes Bradford-born Karan Puri leader of her first overseas territory. Karan and his wife Isha become 10 Downing's glittering power couple. His political soulmate, Oliver, meets his match in Arun, a young Maharashtrian politician sent to repatriate the riches of India's new empire. Assets are grabbed. Freedoms diminished. People killed. The lives of the four become as dangerously entangled as the fatal relationship between India and its imperial jewel. Thrilling, provocative and racy, 30th State imagines a broken Britain desperately taking life-saving assistance from its former colony. The world is turned upside down as a muscular India forces its new dominion to right past wrongs-and creates some new ones.