For fans of The Tea-Planter's Wife and Victoria Hislop comes a gripping story of doomed love and secrets in 1940s Kashmir. Within one exotic land lie the secrets of a lifetime... In 1938, young bride Nerys Watkins accompanies her missionary husband on a posting to India. Up in Srinagar, the British live on beautiful wooden houseboats and dance and gossip as if there is no war. But when the men are sent away to fight Nerys is caught up in a dangerous friendship. Years later, when Mair Ellis clears out her father's house, she finds an antique shawl with a lock of child's hair wrapped up in its folds. Tracing her grandparents' roots back to Kashmir, Mair uncovers a story of great love and great sacrifice.

A stunning novel from the SUNDAY TIMES bestselling author of THE KASHMIR SHAWL London 1919 Born into a down-at-heel family, Nancy Wix is more than her past dictates - more ambitious than the daughter of a faded showman, more original than a woman who will be confined by polite conventions. The end of the Great War has left a stricken London on the brink of an uncertain future, and with their hard-won freedoms now in doubt Nancy and her fellow suffragettes must strive all over again for the right to control their own destinies. At a time when shattered families are struggling to let go of their dead, Nancy discovers she has a gift that offers hope to the loved ones of the lost generation, and a chance encounter reveals a way in which she might use it for her own ends. As Nancy struggles to break free from the rigid bonds of society and find her place in the world, the only thing that could hold her back is her love for an unattainable man...

The new novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Iris and Ruby. Connie Thorne was a foundling, a child left by her mother for strangers to find. Forty years on, without ever being able to discover her true identity, she has put all her energy into creating a flawless shell for herself. As a child, she was musical, her sister Jeanette was deaf. One of them was dark, the other sunny. Yet they both fell in love with the same man. And her feelings for Bill, Jeanette's husband, are the one part of herself that Connie can never reshape. When she hears the news that her sister is dying, the last thing Connie wants is to leave her Bali home and return to London. But with the bitterness of betrayal still between them, Connie and Jeanette have to learn to forgive each other. Surrounded by family, can Constance make her peace with who she really is - and who she loves?

From the bestselling author of The Kashmir Shawl Born into an aristocratic family, beautiful Amy Lovell leads a whirlwind life of extravagant parties and debutante balls. But Amy, curious about the world beyond the narrow confines of her class, is ill-suited to a life of indulgence. Eagerly embracing a nursing career, she is drawn into the radical politics of the day. As the spectre of war looms, Amy's bittersweet love for the proud miner Nick Penry - a love which defies the differences between them - leads them to the conflict in Spain, where love and pain become inseparable agonies.

From the bestselling author of The Kashmir Shawl They were three modern women. They came to Oxford University full of hopes and dreams and would leave forever changed. Helen: shy, quiet and hopelessly in love with Lord Oliver Mortimore, the dazzling, self-destructive blond who lives for fast cars, drink and drugs. Chloe: glamorous and confident, abandoning a high-powered career and broken affair, obsessively drawn to her philandering English professor. Pansy: stunning heiress and aspiring actress, driven to prove she is more than an irresistible magnet to the men who flock to her. Together for one unforgettable year, they would share a lifetime of emotions and a very special friendship...

From the bestselling author of The Kashmir Shawl Dinah Steward has a secret. Hidden beneath the comfortable family life she shares with her successful husband Matthew and their two sons lies a shameful secret that has haunted Dinah for fifteen years. She and Matt never speak of it or the impossible choice he forced her to make all those years ago: they think the cracks have been papered over. But when a chance encounter brings the past into sharp focus once more, Dinah realises she can no longer deny the truth. She decides to risk everything - her husband, her sons, her perfect lifestyle, in order to claim what was always hers.

From the bestselling author of Iris and Ruby comes a novel in which a group of old friends reunite to start a new stage of their lives. Miranda Meadowe decides a lonely widowhood in her crumbling country house is not for her. Reviving a university dream, she invites five of her oldest friends to come and join her to live, and to stave off the prospect of old age. All have their own reasons for accepting. To begin with, omens are good. They laugh, dance, drink and behave badly, as they cling to the heritage they thought was theirs for ever: power, health, stability. They are the baby boomers; the world is theirs to change. But as old attractions resurface alongside new tensions, they discover that the clock can't be put back. When building work reveals an Iron Age burial site of a tribal queen, the outside world descends on their idyllic retreat, and the isolation of the group is breached. Now the past is revealed; and the future that beckons is very different from the one they imagined.

An epic love story and adventure set against the stunning backdrop of Antarctica. Alice Peel is a geologist. She believes in observation and proof. But now she stands alone on the deck of a rickety Chilean ship as a stark landscape reveals itself. Instead of the familiar measurable world, everything that lies ahead of her is unknown and unpredictable. Six weeks earlier her life was comfortably unfolding in an Oxford summer. Then, with her relationship suddenly in pieces, she accepted an invitation to join a group working at the end of the earth: Antarctica. James Rooker is a man on the run. He's been running since his childhood in New Zealand. Now, there is nowhere further to go. He has taken a job working on the same small Antarctic research station. Alice discovers an ice-blue and silver world, lit by sunlight. Nothing has prepared her for the beauty of it, or the claustrophobia of a tiny base shared with eight men and one other woman. The isolation wipes out everyone's past, and tension crackles in the air. But there is a jolt of recognition between Alice and Rooker that is like nothing she has ever known. And it is in Antartica that she discovers something else that will change her life forever ... if she survives.

From the bestselling author of The Kashmir Shawl. Olivia Giorgiadis has left her English roots behind. She lives on a tiny Greek island, married to a local man, mother to two small sons. Year on year, island life has followed a peaceful unchanging rhythm. Until now. An earthquake ravages the coast, its force devastating the island. In the aftermath comes a stranger: an Englishwoman, destitute but for the clothes she wears. Olivia welcomes the stranger into her home, the potter's house. But as Kitty melts into the family and the village community, so Olivia begins to sense that her mysterious visitor threatens all she holds dear...

A gripping, exotic and epic tale for fans of Dinah Jeffries and Victoria Hislop The unexpected arrival of her willful teenage granddaughter, Ruby, brings life and disorder to 82-year-old Iris Black's old house in Cairo. Ruby, driven away from England by her fraught relationship with her own mother, is seeking refuge with the grandmother she hasn't seen for years. An unlikely bond develops as Ruby helps Iris document her fading memories of the glittering, cosmopolitan Cairo of World War Two, and of her one true love - the enigmatic Captain Xan Molyneux - whom she lost to the ravages of war. This lost love shaped Iris's past - and will affect Ruby's future in ways they could not have imagined...

NOW A HAUNTING BBC DRAMA, STARRING GEMMA ARTERTON AND DIANA RIGG 'A remarkable and beautiful book' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'I envy anyone reading it for the first time' AMANDA COE '[Godden has] a genius for storytelling' EVENING STANDARD High in the Himalayas, the mountaintop palace shines like a jewel. Built for the General's harem, laughter and music once floated out over the gorge. Now it sits abandoned, windswept and haunting. The palace is bestowed to the Sisters of Mary, and what was once known as 'the House of Women' becomes the Convent of St Faith. Close to the heavens, the nuns feel inspired, working fervently to establish their school and hospital. But as the isolation and emptiness of the mountain become increasingly unsettling, passions long repressed emerge with tragic consequences . . .

NOW A HAUNTING BBC DRAMA, STARRING GEMMA ARTERTON AND DIANA RIGG 'A remarkable and beautiful book' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'I envy anyone reading it for the first time' AMANDA COE '[Godden has] a genius for storytelling' EVENING STANDARD High in the Himalayas, the mountaintop palace shines like a jewel. Built for the General's harem, laughter and music once floated out over the gorge. Now it sits abandoned, windswept and haunting. The palace is bestowed to the Sisters of Mary, and what was once known as 'the House of Women' becomes the Convent of St Faith. Close to the heavens, the nuns feel inspired, working fervently to establish their school and hospital. But as the isolation and emptiness of the mountain become increasingly unsettling, passions long repressed emerge with tragic consequences . . .

By the author of Black Narcissus and An Episode of Sparrows WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY BESTSELLING AUTHOR ROSIE THOMAS 'One of our best and most captivating novelists' Philip Hensher Sophie, an English ingenue with two children, arrives in Himalayan Kashmir to set up home in a tumbledown cottage surrounded by flowers and herbs. Settling down to live quietly, frugally and peacefully with her new neighbours, she is unaware of the turmoil her arrival provokes as the villagers compete fiercely for her patronage. But when Sophie's cook makes a drastic bid to secure his position, the unwanted consequences are catastrophic . . . Mesmerising and thoughtful, this Godden's lesser-known classic evokes India's uniquely beautiful landscape amidst a timeless tale of misunderstanding.

By the author of Black Narcissus and The River 'One of our best and most captivating novelists' Philip Hensher For Emily Pool, India is a magical place where she has the freedom to escape her mother's suffocating influence. Her days are spent exploring the canals and gardens of East Bengal, and admiringly observing her glamorous, dignified neighbours, the Nikolides. But just as the cracks in Emily's family home are papered over, the Pools strive to maintain an outward impression of respectability, and it is through the Nikolides that Emily is exposed to a world of adult deceit and attrition. And when her beloved dog dies, the event forces a confrontation and reveals to Emily that nothing in the town is quite as it seems . . .

Through an exploration of subjects such as Gandhi impersonators, performance artists, and ritual participants, Mimetic Desires makes an intervention toward understanding the phenomenon of impersonation and guising in South Asia and the world. This volume defines impersonation as the temporary assumption of an identity or guise in social and aesthetic performance that is perceived as not one’s own, and guising as sartorial and kinetic play more generally. Interrogating the legitimacy of the purported dialectic between the "real/original" and "fake/dupe," Mimetic Desires refutes the ordering of identity along the lines of a binary or dichotomy that presupposes the myth of an original identity. By peeling back the layers of performative masks to reveal the process of the masquerade itself, we can see that those with the most social capital are often those with the most power and opportunities to impersonate "up" and "down" social hierarchies. The book’s twelve chapters disclose sites and processes of sociopolitical power facilitated by normative markers of social status relating to race, ethnicity, gender, caste, class, and religion—and how those markers can be manipulated to express and enhance individual and group power. The first comprehensive study to focus on impersonation in South Asia, Mimetic Desires expands on previous scholarship on impersonation and guising in vernacular theatre, dance, public processions, and religious rituals. It is particularly in conversation with the robust scholarship on gender performance in South Asia’s theatrical and dance forms. Mimetic Desires explores some of the contexts and forms of impersonation in South Asia, with its remarkable array of performing arts, to gain insight into the very human and quotidian practices of impersonation and guising.

Through an exploration of subjects such as Gandhi impersonators, "God-men," performance artists, and participants in ritual enactments of sacred stories through dance and theatre, Mimetic Desires makes an intervention toward understanding the phenomenon of impersonation and guising in South Asia and the world. This volume defines impersonation as the temporary assumption of an identity or guise in performance that is perceived to be not one’s own, regardless of whether this assumption is deliberate, intentional, and conscious or not. Interrogating the legitimacy of the purported dialectic between the "real/original" and "fake/dupe," Mimetic Desires refutes any ordering of identity along the lines of a binary or dichotomy that presupposes the myth of an original identity. Guising captures sartorial and kinetic play more generally. By peeling back the layers of performative masks to reveal the process of the masquerade itself, we can see that those with the most social capital are often those with the most power and opportunities to impersonate "up"—and "down"—social hierarchies. The twelve chapters in Mimetic Desires disclose sites and processes of socio-political power facilitated by normative markers of social status relating to race, ethnicity, gender, caste, class, and religion—and how those markers can be manipulated to express and enhance individual and group power. The first comprehensive study to focus on impersonation in South Asia, Mimetic Desires expands on previous scholarship on impersonation and guising in vernacular theatre, dance, public processions, and religious ritual. It is particularly in conversation with the robust scholarship on gender performance and trans-kothi-hijra engagement in theatrical and dance forms in South Asia. Mimetic Desires explores some of the contexts and forms of impersonation in South Asia, with its remarkable array of performing arts, to gain insight into the very human and quotidian practices of impersonation and guising.