Showing results by narrator "Tania Rodrigues" in All Categories

Set in London and Tuscany, Someone Wonderful casts a magical net around the lives of six people: Grace Teape; her orphaned niece, Lily; her young lover, sculptor Johnny Cochrane; her photographer brother, Oliver Cary; his journalist wife, Melissa; and their blind son, Sebastian. With irony, elegance, and insight, Barbara Neil explores the limits of our capacity to protect our own in this joyous and heartbreaking novel.

From the best-selling authors of The Sugar Girls, G.I. Brides weaves together the real-life stories of four women who crossed the ocean for love, providing a moving true tale of romance and resilience. The ‘friendly invasion' of Britain by over a million American G.I.s caused a sensation amongst a generation of young women deprived of male company during the Second World War. With their exotic accents, smart uniforms and aura of Hollywood glamour, the G.I.s soon had the local girls queuing up for a date, and the British boys off fighting abroad turning green with envy.

Years ago, a vast and mysterious object known as the Anomaly was discovered in deep space. All missions to explore and explain it failed. Now, the Anomaly has almost reached Earth, threatening to swallow the planet whole. On an orbital research station, a team of scientists desperately search for a way to stop it or destroy it. One of the crew, Ali, has lost faith in the mission. Following the death of a close friend, her only interest is returning to the ground—to her young son. But strange events, both inside the station and in the void beyond, force Ali to pursue a new mystery.

The personal accounts of three young women who joined up in 1940. In the summer of 1940, Britain stood alone against Germany. The British Army stood at just over one and a half million men, while the Germans had three times that many, and a population almost twice the size of ours from which to draw new waves of soldiers. Clearly, in the fight against Hitler, manpower alone wasn't going to be enough.

We have long understood the Industrial Revolution as a triumphant story of innovation and technology. Empire of Guns, is a rich and ambitious new book by award-winning historian Priya Satia, which upends this conventional wisdom by placing war and Britain’s prosperous gun trade at the heart of the Industrial Revolution and the state’s imperial expansion. Satia brings to life this bustling industrial society with the story of a scandal: Samuel Galton of Birmingham, one of Britain’s most prominent gun makers, was condemned by his fellow Quakers that his profession violated their pacifist principles.

Women made their way to India for exactly the same reasons men did - to carve out a better life for themselves. In the early days, India was a place where the slates of 'blotted pedigrees' were wiped clean; bankrupts given a chance to make good; a taste for adventure satisfied - for women. They went and worked as milliners, bakers, dress makers, actresses, portrait painters, maids, shopkeepers, governesses, teachers, boardinghouse proprietors, midwives, nurses, missionaries, doctors, geologists, plant collectors, writers, travellers and - most surprising of all - traders.

From swimming on Hampstead Heath to illicit trysts in hayfields, or counting stock in corner shops and stifling parenting classes to pedicures in Florence, this collection of short stories includes some previously unpublished in audio, and covers the gamut of human nature—our foibles, our loves, our desires, hopes, ambitions and failures. Rich in observation and speckled with a delicious dark humour, Fool for Love confirms Deborah Moggach's place as one of our finest observers of human life.

As night falls in Delhi, a mother spins tales from her past for her sleeping daughter. Her now grown-up child is a puzzle with a million pieces whom she hopes, through her words and her love, to somehow make whole again. Meanwhile, as the last train from Rajiv Chowk Station pulls away, a young man rides the metro and dreams of murder. In another corner of the city, a newborn wrapped in a blood-red towel lies on the steps of an orphanage as his mother walks away.

Cate Morris and her son, Leo, are homeless. They’ve packed up the boxes from their London home, said good-bye to friends and now they are on their way to Hatters Museum of the Wide Wide World to stay just for the summer. Cate doesn’t want to be there, in Richard’s family home, without Richard to guide her any more. And she knows for sure that Araminta, the retainer of the collection of dusty objects and stuffed animals, has taken against them. But they have nowhere else to go. They have to make the best of it. But Richard hasn’t told Cate the truth about his family’s history.

Every year on Leila's birthday Shalini kneels by the wall with a little yellow spade and scoops dry earth to make a pit for two candles. One each for herself and for Riz, the husband at her side. But as Shalini walks from the patch of grass where she held her vigil the man beside her melts away. It is 16 years since they took her, her daughter's third birthday party, the last time she saw the three people she loves most dearly: her mother, her husband, her child

Bedi and Sushma's marriage is arranged. When they first meet, they stumble through a faltering conversation about happiness and hope and agree to go in search of these things together. But even after their children Selena, Tara and Rohan are grown up and have their own families, Bedi and Sushma are still searching. Years later, the siblings attempt to navigate life without their parents. As they travel to the Ganges to unite their father's ashes with the opaque water, it becomes clear that each of them has inherited the same desire to understand what makes a life happy.

Aisha is a 13-year-old refugee. When she finds she’s being sent to a new foster family, she runs away, seeking shelter in the nearby woods. Twelve-year-old Zak is trying to cope with his parents' divorce. He starts researching the history behind his house, which leads him to an old air-raid shelter in the same woods. Both children meet in the heart of the ancient woodland, and unexpected bonds are formed....

From the frontlines of the NHS, the story of a junior doctor's love, loss and grief through the Covid-19 crisis. In early 2020, junior doctor Roopa Farooki lost her sister to cancer. But just weeks later, she found herself plunged into another kind of crisis, fighting on the frontline of the battle taking place in her hospital, and in hospitals across the country. Everything Is True is the story of Roopa’s first 40 days of the Covid-19 crisis from the frontlines of A&E and the acute medical wards as she battles for her patients’ and colleagues’ survival.

Usha is devastated when her grandmother Kali Ma passes away. Not quite fitting in at school, with her best friend moving away and with an annoying new adoptive sister arriving, Usha feels lost. That is until Kali Ma's ghost appears...with a task for her. Usha and Emtiaz must work together on a quest through London, accompanied by two bickering ghosts, to find a series of objects that shine a magical light on their family's past and hold the clues to securing their future.

Hatters Museum of the Wide Wide World, a dilapidated, once-whimsical museum, offers unexpected solace to a grieving widow and exposes secrets that will alter the course of her life. When Cate and Richard met at university they felt an immediate spark, but as the couple matured, Richard’s inner demons threatened their happiness. With time, he receded further and further into darkness until he disappeared altogether. Now, four years after Richard’s passing, Cate is let go from her teaching job and can’t pay the rent on the London flat she shares with her and Richard’s son, Leo.

Feeling lost and alone in a strange new city, Leelu wishes she could fly away back home - her real home where her dad is, thousands of miles away. London is cold and grey, and the neighbours are noisy, and there’s concrete everywhere. But Leelu is not alone; someone is leaving her gifts outside her house - wonders, which give her curious magical powers. Powers that might help her find her way home.

Clara has lived a life of solitude, home schooled under her mean uncle's strict regime...until now! The day that Uncle abandons Clara, leaving her with nothing but a wedge of 'guilt money' and a half empty, crumbling manor house, she is determined to do things her way for a change. And when streetwise Peter turns up, with his rescue cat and a surprising array of knowledge, she is sure that between them they have everything they need to survive.

Looking back to the Vienna of Klimt and Freud and forward to the shadow that is starting to fall over Europe, Sebastian Faulks' new novel is an intensely personal story that focuses on Lena, a spirited girl born with nothing, and Anton, a man of passion and self-doubt. Lena was born with nothing but her own strength of character to an alcoholic mother in a small town in southern Austria in 1906. Anton is the restless son of a bourgeois family who sets out to make his fortune in pre-First World War Vienna.

Tanya Tania is a story about two young women coming of age in two countries that are coming of age. Tanya Talati in Karachi and Tania Ghosh in Bombay, daughters of college best friends, write to each other of what cannot be said to anyone else: a mother who has gone from quiet to silent, sex that has become a weapon, a servant with unforgettably soft hands and a country beginning to play with religion.

Cat & Fiddle centres on two families whose lives become entwined at the country estate of Bourne Abbey. While Dr. Choudhury is busy advising Henry Bourne on the restoration of the abbey to its former glory, his wife's main concern is marrying off their three children, whose chances of good matches are dwindling by the day. Thankfully the royal family always seems to have a solution to her problems.