A rich and dramatic story of a poor young Indian boy who fights like a tiger to achieve fame and fortune In a village just outside present-day Calcutta, Koonty, a young girl is squatting in pain beside the river, convinced that her agony is the result of a fish allergy. It's not -- she's giving birth and as the realisation dawns on her, she makes the connection with the encounter she had all those months ago with the swimming stranger with the golden bathing shorts... Horrified, she places the baby onto a piece of floating debris, fixes her own necklace around his neck and pushes him...
A rich and dramatic story of a poor young Indian boy who fights like a tiger to achieve fame and fortune In a village just outside present-day Calcutt...
As a child-so tiny and delicate that her father calls her fairy-Morgan has a special relationship with nature, for she can hear the Silence, the harmonising force that creates and sustains all things. The hum-ming of the Silence is her secret, even from her beloved father, as is the day that she walks along a cobweb.
But with adolescence comes a loss of childhood innocence and the intrusion into her perfect world of an unwanted step-mother and baby sister. These loud and chaotic presences, together with an act, as she perceives it, of unwarranted violence by her father, have a...
As a child-so tiny and delicate that her father calls her fairy-Morgan has a special relationship with nature, for she can hear the Silence, the ha...
First published in 1991, Absolute Hush is set during the Second World War when the human race stands at the crossroads: self-destruction or a glorious evolutionary step to higher consciousness.
In the grand and moated Plague House, served since the start of the war only by the spiteful charlady, Mrs Lovage, live beautiful Elizabeth and her thirteen-year-old twins -plump pyromaniac George and Sissy, always struggling with her mother for her brother's love. Into this strange household comes Lump - otherwise known as Hush - intent on saving the world. But initial confidence...
First published in 1991, Absolute Hush is set during the Second World War when the human race stands at the crossroads: self-destruction or ...
The Mandel family is rich, powerful and superstitious. Twenty years ago things were very different when they arrived in Calcutta, starving and penniless, intent on making their fortune. Now, Papa Mandel, ruthless architect of the Mandel success story, is dead but his spirit lives on in his unwitting daughter Jayanthi.
Jayanthi is an avid reader of romantic magazines, and the plans for her marriage -a marriage of convenience which will further extend the Mandel influence -seem depressingly loveless to her; the more so as the wedding day approaches and increasingly bloody events...
The Mandel family is rich, powerful and superstitious. Twenty years ago things were very different when they arrived in Calcutta, starving and penn...
In a once great, now falling, mansion live an aristocratic family: Alice, huge, sad and longing for love; her paralysed mother who is subject to wild and eccentric enthusiasms; and the foster child Agnes, whose desire to be an actress sets in motion a train of bizarre and horrifying events. Then love comes to Alice in the form of beautiful but furtive Vincent who has moved in next door. But does he want Alice for herself or for the treasures that she digs from the rubble of her tumbled home? And how does he view Alice's obsession with compost, the making of which she compares to the...
In a once great, now falling, mansion live an aristocratic family: Alice, huge, sad and longing for love; her paralysed mother who is subject to wi...
Today is Julia Clockhouse's twenty-fifth birthday. Her long-suffering Hindu servants are frantically trying to organise a party for her, but it's hard to do so amid the havoc wreaked by her wild spirit. They think she is possessed. Daughters of colonial tea-planters shouldn't have souls that escape their bodies, move objects with their minds, hear tongueless yogis speak. Julia Clockhouse does.
As the day passes and the chaos mounts in the kitchen, Julia listens desperately for the return of her husband. Ben may have married her on the orders of her domineering father, but he had come...
Today is Julia Clockhouse's twenty-fifth birthday. Her long-suffering Hindu servants are frantically trying to organise a party for her, but it's h...
When Hermione - eccentric, seventy and returned from India to a 'safe' life in the Home Counties - encounters Slug street-painting on the pavement, she employs him as assistant gardener. Slug, who has the motto ' Never Grow Old' tattooed across his head, will soon sort out Gerald, the pin-striped head gardener, soften his ruthless marshalling of her plants and introduce a more effusive atmosphere to her estate.
But when Hugh, Hermione's huge husband, dies, Slug's skinhead cronies begin to threaten her peace, and Hermione retreats to the chaos of India, chasing the memories of her...
When Hermione - eccentric, seventy and returned from India to a 'safe' life in the Home Counties - encounters Slug street-painting on the pavement,...
Above them the great rock bulged out like a too clever forehead, too clever for anything to grow upon, too smooth for anyone to climb... It might be the only place on earth which is so high and difficult to get to, that people can't reach it.
When Sangita the Ranee of Bidwar is caught up in a scandal, her husband banishes her from the palace and forbids access to their young son, Anwar. She lives miserably as a disgraced woman, praying to Ganesh for Anwar to be taken from her husband, so that he would know her suffering. Then, Anwar goes missing. In a hill-tribe...
Above them the great rock bulged out like a too clever forehead, too clever for anything to grow upon, too smooth for anyone to climb... It migh...