Book excerpt: Across the Black Waters is widely rated as an outstanding novel. It is a simple story about the ultimate futility and sorrow of war. It is a journey not just from a small village in Punjab to Flanders, from father to soldier, field to front — but from a soul that nurtures to one that kills. Overlooking the claims of war classics like All Quiet on the Western Front, the British Council selected and adapted this novel into a play to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War I. "The foremost of Indian novelists." — Daily Telegraph "His descriptions of brutality match in compassion and outrage, and perhaps also in poetic flair, those of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sasson, or David Jones." — Alastair Niven, British Literary Critic