Library


Gerald Hanley
1916 - 1992


Monsoon Victory
This book is an account of the Burma campaign, where Gerald served, from the point of view of a war correspondent attacked to the East African Division.

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The Consul at Sunset
This book is set in a colonial outpost in Ethiopia where a man of integrity is seeking an honourable course between justice and expediency. It examines the relative power given by colonial authorities to its personnel.

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The Year of the Lion
This is the story of a colonist in Kenya attempting to wrestle with the nature of Africa only to realise that he is up against forces that he cannot overcome. It is an interesting analysis of the limits of colonial power at the individual level to influence the environment and cultures they find themselves within.

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Drinkers of Darkness
A dark look at the dissolution of Empire in Africa as British colonists have to come to terms with the disintegrating reality of the limits of imperial power. The events take place in the run up to Christmas but the colonist's world is every bit as run down and ramshackle as that of the natives that they are purporting to bring civilisation to.

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The Journey Homeward
A complex novel about the end of Britain's rule in India. A British missionary finds herself employed in an India having to come to terms with post-imperial rule. There are a number of competing ideologies as events test the systems and beliefs of the characters.

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Gilligan's Last Elephant
A tale of psychological warfare between hunters in East Africa. It turns a light on the final days of Empire and hunting as the ecological consequences of Great Game hunting comes to its logical conclusion.

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Warriors: Life and Death Among the Somalis
This is an autobiographical account of fighting in a oft forgotten theatre of World War Two in the Horn of Africa. He describes how British Army soldiers were charged with preventing bloodshed between feuding tribes at a remote outstation in Somalia. Hanley turns this period of his life, a difficult time that drove seven officers to suicide, into a devastating critique of imperialism.

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Noble Descents
Hanley examines the immediate post-imperial India just a few years after the British had left. In the aftermath of the Empire most expatriates returned to Britain if only to become foreigners in their own land. However, some stayed on in post-imperial India and this book examines what could happen to people who wished to embrace the changing realities.

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