Book excerpt: A Night in London chronicles the diverse and often conflicting emotional, ideological and political aspirations of an entire generation of Indian students in Europe. The novella sheds light on the dynamics of late imperial culture-English working-class politics, anti-colonial sentiment and race relations-like no other sustained narrative by an expatriate Indian author of the same period. Long considered a landmark in twentieth-century Urdu fiction, A Night in London is being made available in English for the first time in a translation by Bilal Hashmi. The volume also features an introduction by Carlo Coppola, a noted scholar and critic of Urdu literature.