Though brought together in a friendship that neither jealousy nor violence could shatter, the Hazards and the Mains are torn apart by the storm of events that has divided the nation. "Superb! You will gain a firsthand knowledge of life at West Point in the early 1800s...a peek at the Texas frontier, a vacation in a posh cottage at Newport...experience the savagery of war in Mexico, suffer the suspense of both the Charleston Battery and beleaguered Fort Sumter before the mortar fire that launched a war. It has been a long time since I enjoyed a book so much." (The Asheville Citizen-Times)

    The major theme is the dictatorship of the state and discrimination suffered by the immigrant Nepalese. Thule and Satar, the major characters represent thousands of poor, innocent and illiterate Nepali youths who flee their homes every year with the dream of better quality of life but their dreams get shattered in the hands of frauds and tyrants in the alien land. Various well known authors and critics like Parijat and Michael Hutt have spent words to praise the magic the twenty one year old author cast on the audience in those days and even now.For Parijat, Muglãn is “the second novel I have read in a single breath, within a decade. Unless the language, style, presentation is good, it becomes difficult to read any literature”. Muglan, however, is criticized for being too pessimistic in tone and exaggerating the then existing circumstances. Muglan has been rendered into English from Nepali by Lekhnath Sharma Pathak.

    At thirty-four she finds that her external life of dreary routine fails to match up to her lush, wistful and dreamy internal life. Norah, her energetic and chaotic friend, is equally settled in her own marriage to an irritable university professor.Then Hugh Miller and his sister Claire descend upon the quiet town. On all four, the hypnotic charm of these two visitors exerts an enchanting spell. And after their departure, life - having been violently disrupted - will never be quite the same again . . .

    

    The autobiographical elements of the book are well documented. Its publication caused acute distress to Woolf’s family. Leonard’s sister, Bella, urged him to bury the novel, while his mother was shocked and mortified by unflattering portraits of herself and her neighbors. Two weeks after reading the novel, Virginia Woolf suffered the worst of her many breakdowns.As a roman à clef the novel holds considerable interest for its picture of Leonard and Virginia’s courtship, as well as its sketches of Vanessa Stephen and Clive Bell. (Virginia would later retell the story, from a much different perspective, in Night and Day.) But the novel offers the contemporary reader other rewards. It remains a witty, engaging satire about English society just before World War I and its conventions and prejudices. In Harry Davis, Woolf created a memorable Jewish antihero who rails against society’s conventions but tragically finds himself unable to escape them. Award-winning biographer Victoria Glendinning contributes a foreword to this new paperback edition.

    He wanted to talk about Wells's "Time Machine" but he knew that'd be no use -- these folks didn't read that sort of thing. "If the earth had settled down, we'd have been lower. If it had settled to one side, we'd have been moved one way or another, but as it's settled back in the Fourth Dimension, we're going back in time." "Then --""We're in a runaway skyscraper, bound for some time back before the discovery of America!