Break of Gauge is a novel in three volumes, read aloud one chapter at a time.
Goa, March 1880: a servant runs into a presbytery yard because a newborn is not breathing right, and the padre's boy carries the lamp. Across the subcontinent, in the river towns of Sindh, a railway guard learns the halts of a line he will ride for the rest of his working life. Volume I, The Register, follows two families, one Catholic and Goan, one Hindu and Sindhi, through sixty years of parish registers, railway journals, plague, flood and the freedom movement, until the autumn of 1942, when each house holds a wedding and the war comes down the line.
Built on one family's own records and memories, and on the public history around them. Episodes are released in order; start with the Prelude.