Two stunning, Booker Prize-winning historical novels that vividly chronicle the crumbling edges of the British Empire in India and Ireland--in one Contemporary Classics hardcover.<br>  <br> Inspired by historical events, <i>The Siege of Krishnapur </i>is the mesmerizing tale of a British outpost, under siege during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, whose residents find their smug assumptions of moral and military superiority and their rigid class barriers under fire—literally and figuratively. The hero of <i>Troubles, </i>having survived the battles of World War I, makes his way to Ireland in 1919, in search of his once-wealthy fiancée. What he finds is her family's enormous seaside hotel in a spectacular state of decline, overgrown and overrun by herds of cats and pigs and the few remaining guests. From this strange perch, moving from room to room as the hotel falls down around him, he witnesses the distant tottering of the Empire in the East and the rise of the violent "Troubles" in Ireland.