Awful and fantastic!

This story is captivating from first to last. It's something like a grisly novel combined with a true crime narrative, as a huge part of it is derived from factual sources. It's beautifully written and very descriptive of manners, places, people, tribes, cities and so on. Anyone familiar with the places in modern times, or being a traveller along those roads, can appreciate this old story has the aroma of truth and experience. The author achieves that amazing thing of presenting you with a terrible and amoral main character and by turns tricking you into sympathising with him and then recoiling from his horrible mentality and deeds. And then doing it again! And again! It's sometimes hard to remember that the author was writing in the 1830s as it is hard hitting and uncompromising and rather slyly funny and non-judgemental in places, in ways that we're more used to finding in edgy, modern works. The narration is really good, a rare thing in an Anglo Indian audio book. I'd go so far as to say beautifully read. This is one of the longest audio books I've listened to and I went through it with hardly a break!

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