Showing results by narrator "Raj Ghatak" in All Categories

In the feverish tropics of the Andaman Islands, a young Botanist tends to a fragile rose he has imported to welcome his bride. Hoping their marriage will bloom in this strange life, hundreds of miles from the East Coast of India, he is entranced by Chanda Devi's fierce nature and unusual gifts; speaking to trees and the ghosts of former colonialists. These islands, she tells her adoring husband, rest on a fault line, cracked so deep into the earth that spirits cross the boundary freely. But it is not this fracture that takes a tragic bite out of their happiness. 

Why does it make sense to Ethiopian runners to get up at three a.m. to run up and down a hill? Who would choose to train on almost impossibly steep and rocky terrain, in hyena territory? And how come Ethiopian men hold six of the top 10 fastest marathon times ever? Michael Crawley spent 15 months in Ethiopia training alongside (and sometimes a fair way behind) runners at all levels of the sport, from night watchmen hoping to change their lives to world-class marathon runners, in order to answer these questions.

The narrative focuses on the imaginative and institutional structures that have successfully sustained and transformed India, first under British colonial rule and then, after 1947, as an independent country. Woven into the larger political narrative is an account of India's social and economic development and its rich cultural life. The final chapter charts the dramatic developments of the last 20 years, from 1990 through to the Congress electoral victory of 2009, and the rise of the Indian high-tech industry in a country still troubled by poverty and political unrest. 

When Santosh Wagh isn’t struggling out of a bottle of whisky he’s head of Private India, the Mumbai branch of the world’s finest PI agency. In a city of over 13 million he has his work cut out at the best of times. But now someone is killing women - seemingly unconnected women murdered in a chilling ritual, with strange objects placed carefully at their death scenes.

From the prize-winning author of West, a collision between old and new, east and west, in a former British hill station in contemporary South India. Fleeing the dark undercurrents of contemporary life in Britain, Hilary Byrd takes refuge in Ooty, a hill station in South India. There he finds solace in life's simple pleasures, travelling by rickshaw around the small town with his driver, Jamshed, and staying in a mission house beside the local presbytery where the Padre and his adoptive daughter, Priscilla, have taken Hilary under their wing.

A surgeon working in a dilapidated clinic in the hinterland is visited in the dead of night by a family - a man, his pregnant wife and their eight-year-old son. Victims of a senseless attack, they reveal to the surgeon wounds that they could not possibly have survived. The surgeon is then issued a preposterous task: to mend the wounds of the dead before sunrise so that the family can return to life. But this is not the only challenge laid before him....

Since 2007, entrepreneur and philanthropist Vikas Shah MBE has been on a mission to interview the people shaping our century. Including conversations with world leaders, Nobel prizewinners, business leaders, artists and Olympians, he quizzes the minds that matter on the big questions that concern us all. We often talk of war and conflict, the economy, culture, technology and revolutions as if they are something other than us. But all these things are a product of us - people like you, who have ideas that matter. 

This collection contains more than 30 enthralling new retellings of favourite myths as well as some you might not have heard before! Including Theseus and the Minotaur, The Twelve Labours of Herakles and the escapades of Jason and the Argonauts, each myth is told in engaging modern language, which is easy for children to understand yet still retains the humour and intrigue of the original tales. Children will love exploring the tales by themselves or as bedtime stories.

Ozzy is perfectly ordinary - that is, until he finds himself hired as a nurse at Dr von Sichertall’s failing monster surgery. He has his work cut out helping to treat the extraordinary patients, and he has to find a way to save the practice.

Her eccentric and childless guardian, Mr. Penicuik, is leaving Kitty all of his vast fortune - but with one condition. She must marry one of his five grand-nephews. However, Kitty's clear favourite - the rakish Jack Westruther - doesn't appear at all interested in the arrangement. To make Jack jealous, Kitty impulsively convinces his cousin, the kind-hearted and chivalrous Freddy Standen, to enter into a pretend engagement. But the more time she spends with Freddy, the more Kitty wonders whether Jack is the right choice after all....

We like to think we know the story of how Britain went to war with Germany in 1939, but there is one part of the story that has never been told. It features a group of MPs who repeatedly spoke out against their party and their government's policy of appeasing Hitler and Mussolini. Remarkably, nearly all of them were gay or bisexual. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain hated them. He had them followed, harassed, spied upon and derided in the press and called them 'the glamour boys' in reference to their sexuality.