Catherine, an impetuous thirteen year-old, sails with her family from England to India in 1709. Her father is an officer in the army of the East India Company. Catherine dreams of Calcutta balls and meeting handsome young men, but her mother has different plans . . . . Living in India for twenty years, Catherine has a series of extraordinary adventures and relationships. Based on the real life of Catherine Cooke.

In June 1992, author Roy Moxham did a very strange thing: he wrote to a bandit in an Indian jail. Phoolan Devi was the controversial and charismatic 'Bandit Queen' hailed as a modern-day Robin Hood in the villages surrounding Delhi. In revenge for her own gang rape, her followers killed 20 high-caste Indians, which led to her surrender and imprisonment.Struck by her story and appalled by her plight, Roy Moxham helped Phoolan Devi obtain justice, offered her encouragement when she b...

In the three centuries that followed Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route from Europe to India, European powers made a beeline for India's fabled riches, its spices, gold and gems. Though they ostensibly came for trade and commerce, and the thrill of discovering a new land, the lines between exploration and exploitation soon blurred. The Theft of India documents the intense rivalry for spoils that played out between the British, the French, the Dutch and the Portuguese, and the impac...

World famous Indian detective Vish Puri provides a comprehensive guide to the ancient Indian field of investigation and its application in the modern context, including invaluable recommendations for all types of disguises and undercover aliases, operational procedures and methods of detection and observation, not overlooking useful information regarding procedures for vetting prospective brides and grooms, where to get the best street foods while conducting stake outs, and the importance ...

After her epic journey from Ireland to India by bicycle in 1963, Dervla Murphy immersed herself in the life of the sub-continent, working for six months in an orphanage for Tibetan children in Northern India. She fell in love with the 'Tiblets' - the cheerful, uncomplaining, independent and affectionate children of the new Tibet-in-exile - but she also managed to explore India's Tibetan frontier, leaving the reader panting in her wake. Alongside her enchantment, Dervla became a perceptive ...

William Dalrymple, who wrote so magically about India in ‘City of Djinns’, returns to the country in a series of remarkable essays.Featured in its pages are 15-year-old guerrilla girls and dowager Maharanis; flashy Bombay drinks parties and violent village blood feuds; a group of vegetarian terrorists intent on destroying India’s first Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet; and a palace where port and cigars are still carried to guests on a miniature silver steam train.Dalrymple me...

In Maharnis Lucy Moore brilliantly recreates the lives of four princesses - two grandmothers, a mother and a daughter - of the Royal courts of India. Their extraordinary story takes in tiger hunts, exotic palaces and lavish ceremonies in India, as well as the glamorous international scene of the Edwardian and interwar era. It is also an intimate portrait of four remarkable women - Chimnabai, Sunity, Indira and Ayesha - who changed the world they lived in. Through their lives Lucy Moore tel...

India’s Westernized elite, cut off from local traditions, ‘want to write a full stop in a land where there are no full stops’. From that striking insight Mark Tully has woven a superb series of ‘stories’ which explore Calcutta, from the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad (probably the biggest religious festival in the world) to the televising of a Hindu epic. Throughout, he combines analysis of major issues with a feel for the fine texture and human realities of Indian life. The result is a revelatio...

A shattering, utterly immersive work of investigative journalism, The Good Girls slips behind political maneuvering, caste systems and codes of honour in a village in northern India to tell the real story behind the tragic deaths of two teenage girls and an epidemic of violence against women.In the early dawn one day in 2014, a man discovered the dead bodies of 14-year-old Lalli Shakya and 16-year-old Padma Shakya hanging from a mango tree on the edge of t...

From the author of The Last Mughal and Nine Lives: the classic stories he gathered during the ten years he spent journeying across the Indian subcontinent, from Sri Lanka and southern India to the North West Frontier of Pakistan. As he searched for evidence of Kali Yug, the “age of darkness” predicted by an ancient Hindu cosmology in a final epoch of strife and corruption, Dalrymple encountered a region that thrilled and surprised him. Venturing to places rarely visited b...

Mark Tully is incomparable. No one has a greater understanding of the passions, the contradictions, the humour, the tragedy and the staggering resilience that constitute India. In his long awaited new book, he delves further than ever before into this country of one billion people. Covering subjects as diverse as Hindu extremism, bonded child labour, Sufi mysticism, the crisis in agriculture, the persistence of political corruption and the problem of Kashmir, he paints a picture of India a...

A history of larger-than-life characters and the demise of the tiny Himalayan kingdom nestled between India and China.This is the true story of Sikkim, a tiny Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas that survived the end of the British Empire only to be annexed by India in 1975.It tells the remarkable tale of Thondup Namgyal, the last King of Sikkim, and his American wife, Hope Cooke, thrust unwittingly into the spotlight as they sought support for Sikkim's independence a...