The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott

Instead of one engrossing summer novel, how about four? (Five, if you count the coda, STAYING ON.) I spent a summer wholly immersed in Scott's books, which capture the unraveling of Britain's morally corrupt rule in India and the ghastly consequences of its ending in intense, unforgettable detail. As soon as I finished book three, I set it down, left the house, got in my car, and drove straight to the bookstore to buy book four (it took visiting a few, but I found it + called off work the next day to read). The publisher's blurb describes it as Tolstoyan, which fits—like WAR AND PEACE, Scott's story attempts to hold a whole, complex, incredibly messy geopolitical moment in time and its impacts on individual lives; I'd throw in Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalets as a comp, too, because like those books, these are utterly propulsive reads (no Tolstoyan digressions on the nature of history or drawing room interludes in French to slow you down, ha).