Loot by Tania James is a captivating tale involving a mechanical tiger, the looting of a sultan’s palace, and the journey one man takes to retrieve a lost artifact. In Mysore in 1794, a teenage artisan, Abbas, is recruited by Tipu Sultan to apprentice with a French clockmaker, Lucien du Leze, in order to create a remarkable object: an automaton tiger attacking a British soldier, to celebrate the return of Tipu’s sons from captivity. But, when Mysore falls into British control in 1799, Tipu Sultan’s palace is ransacked by the British, and the tiger is stolen, leaving Abbas to flee to France with Lucien and his daughter, Jehanne, where the three plot how to get the tiger back from an estate deep in the English countryside. Based on real events, Loot expertly tackles the long and thorny history of colonialism and the deep scars it leaves on history.