Showing results by author "Alice Albinia" in All Categories

Following the mighty river upstream, this highly acclaimed, award-winning travelogue takes the listener on a voyage through 2000 miles of spectacular landscapes and fiercely contested territory, and back through 5000 years of rich and eventful history.

The Indus rises in Tibet, flows west across India, and south through Pakistan. For millennia it has been worshipped as a god; for centuries used as a tool of imperial expansion. Empires of the Indus follows the river upstream and back in time, taking the listener on a voyage through two thousand miles of geography and more than five thousand years of history redolent with contemporary importance.

On an unnamed archipelago off the east coast of Britain, the impossible has come to pass. Women control the civic institutions. Decide how the islands’ money is spent. Run the businesses. Tend to their families. Teach the children hope for a better world. They say that this gynotopia is Eva Levi’s life’s work, and that now she has disappeared, it will be destroyed. But they don’t know about Cwen. Cwen has been here longer than the civilisation she has returned to haunt. The clouds are her children, and the waves.

The Britannias tells the story of Britain's islands and how they are woven into its collective cultural psyche. From Neolithic Orkney to modern-day Thanet, Alice Albinia explores the furthest reaches of Britain's island topography, once known (wrote Pliny) by the collective term, Britanniae. Sailing over borders, between languages and genres, trespassing through the past to understand the present, this book knocks the centre out to foreground neglected epics and subversive voices.

In her fiction debut, Alice Albinia weaves a multithreaded epic tale that encompasses divine saga and familial discord and introduces an unforgettable heroine. Leela - alluring, taciturn, haunted - is moving from New York back to Delhi. Worldly and accomplished, she has been in self-imposed exile from India and her family for decades; 22 years earlier, her sister was seduced by the egotistical Vyasa, and the fallout from their relationship drove Leela away. Now an eminent Sanskrit scholar, Vyasa is preparing for his son’s marriage. But when Leela arrives for the wedding, she disrupts the careful choreography of the weekend....