How long is it?
224 pages in the University of Chicago Press 1998 paperback edition.
Reading facts
✓ Checked- Reading effort
- 51 / 100Moderate
- Length
- 224 pagesUniversity of Chicago Press · 1998
- Reading time
- 4 h 30 minat 50 pages an hour ·
- Pace
- Measured
- Emotional intensity
- 3 / 5
About 4 h 30 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 9 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
About the book
In 1972, Tusker and Lucy Smalley are the last British couple in Pankot, an Indian hill town where they remained after independence. Living on a small pension in a lodge at Smith’s Hotel, they face an uncertain future as the hotel’s owners pursue their own ambitions. Tusker withdraws into silence or angry outbursts, while Lucy remembers the marriage she hoped for and measures it against their life together.
Reader notes
The humor is domestic and often painful, catching affection inside quarrels and long-established grievances. Memories pass among several characters, so the literary novel unfolds through recollection as much as present action, linking the disappointments of a marriage to the fading habits of colonial life.
How it reads
- Writing style
- Stream of consciousness
- Tone
- Humorous · Melancholic
- Structure
- Nonlinear
- Driven by
- Character · Relationships
- Point of view
- Third person, limited · Multiple viewpoints
- Setting
- Pankot, India
Reading complexity
- Writing
- 3 / 5
- Ideas
- 3 / 5
- Structure
- 4 / 5
- Background knowledge
- 2 / 5
About this profile
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
- Writing
- How much attention the sentences and language require.
- Ideas
- How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
- Structure
- How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
- Background knowledge
- Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
- Emotional intensity
- Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.
Themes
- Marriage
- Aging
- Belonging
- Class
- Memory
- Colonialism and empire
Content notes
- Violence
- None
- Sexual content
- Mild
- Swearing
- Mild
- Substance use
- Mild
- Abuse
- Mild
- Self-harm or suicide
- None
Standing and awards
Highly regarded
- Booker Prize, 1977
Questions readers ask
Which edition is shown here?
University of Chicago Press · 1998 · Paperback. ISBN 9780226743493.
How long does it take to read Staying On?
About 4 hours 30 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 224-page University of Chicago Press edition. Dense books can take longer.
About the author
Paul Scott
Paul Scott was an English novelist whose service in India, Burma, and Malaya during the Second World War informed his sustained examination of British rule in South Asia. His fiction works through layered testimony rather than a commanding historical overview. Letters, interviews, memories, shifting viewpoints, and changes in time expose how prejudice and self-interest shape what characters can know or admit. The Raj Quartet follows soldiers, administrators, families, and Indian characters as war and the independence movement unsettle an imperial order. Its opening crisis in The Jewel in the Crown, involving Daphne Manners, Hari Kumar, and police superintendent Ronald Merrick, spreads outward because private intimacy is turned into contested public evidence. Scott’s dense, atmospheric narration gives institutions weight without losing the hesitations and evasions of individual voices. Staying On narrows the scale to Tusker and Lucy Smalley, an aging British couple left in post-independence Pankot. Their financial worries and marital grievances are handled with rueful humor, while the modernizing town quietly reveals how little place remains for their inherited habits.
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Edition and details
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Publication year
- 1998
- Format
- Paperback
- Pages
- 224
- ISBN
- 9780226743493
- Edition language
- English
- Original language
- English
- First published
- 1977
- Genres and form
- Fiction · Novel · Literary Fiction · Literary fiction · Psychological fiction · Social novel
- Editions
- 16
- Languages
- 2 (English, Unspecified)