Two new novels by T D Griggs and Alison McQueen portray the clash of cultures in the days of the British empire. The authors join to discuss writing about the empire in 21st-century fiction and how different cultures interact and collide.

Griggs’s Distant Thunder is set in 1890s Bangalore, Sudan and London. It features Frank Gray, a boy who saw his mother savagely beaten to death by a cavalry officer in Bangalore, and Grace Dearborn, who grows up in a privileged family in England, but comes to realise the true human cost of her family’s fortune. McQueen’s The Secret Children opens in 1920s Assam and tells the story of two girls born to an Indian woman and a colonial father, growing up caught between two different worlds. It is based on the writer’s own family history.