Showing results by narrator "Ayesha Dharker" in All Categories

This book tells the stories of girls and boys from around the world and the challenges they have faced and overcome. It features over 29 tales of amazing young girls and boys who have achieved the unimaginable - from surviving a plane crash in the jungle to striking against climate change. There are tales of triumphing over illness and injury, and of overcoming bullying. Entries include Greta Thunberg, Boyan Slat and Phiona Mutesi, to name a few.

We begin with the footsteps of a family walking along a beach 950,000 years ago. From here, Montefiore takes us on an exhilarating epic journey through the families that have shaped our world: the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Mughals, Bonapartes, Habsburgs and Zulus, Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Krupps, Churchills, Kennedys, Castros, Nehrus, Pahlavis and Kenyattas, Saudis, Kims and Assads.

Yasmin Ghorami has a lot to be grateful for: a loving family, a fledgling career in medicine and a charming, handsome fiancé, fellow doctor Joe Sangster. But now the moment she has been dreading has arrived: it is time for her family to meet Joe's firebrand feminist mother. As the two families are drawn closer together, long-held secrets, lies and betrayals unravel on both sides—and Yasmin is forced to ask herself what she really wants in a relationship and what a 'love marriage' actually means ...

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of M.M. Kaye’s epic novel of love and war. M.M. Kaye’s masterwork is a vast, rich and vibrant tapestry of love and war that spans over twenty years, moving from the foothills of the Himalayas, to the burning plains, to the besieged British Mission in Kabul. It begins in 1857 when, following the Indian Mutiny, young English orphan Ashton is disguised by his ayah Sita as her Indian son, Ashok. As he forgets his true identity, his destiny is set...

In The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula, one of seven 'unmade movies' available on audio, it is 1934, and young Englishwoman Penny is travelling by train across India in search of her missing sister. En route, she meets sibling artistes Prem and Lakshmi, who have been hired by a Maharajah and his wife, the Rani, to entertain their aristocratic European guest. But evil lurks in the hidden caverns beneath the ancient palace, where the acolytes of a fiendish blood cult await their next human sacrifice....

A Suitable Boy is Vikram Seth's epic love story set in India. Funny and tragic, with engaging, brilliantly observed characters, it is as close as you can get to Dickens for the twentieth century. The story unfolds through four middle class families: the Mehras, Kappoors, Khans, and Chatterjis. Lata Mehra, a university student, is under pressure from her mother to get married. But not to just anyone she happens to fall in love with.

Delhi, 1946. Ma and Bappu teach at the local university. Their fourteen-year-old daughter—precocious, headstrong Alma—is soon to be married: Alma is mostly interested in the wedding shoes and spinning wild stories for her little sister Roop. Times are bad for girls in India: the long-awaited independence from British rule brings unrest that threatens to unravel the rich tapestry of Delhi. And when Partition happens overnight, Ma, Bappu, Alma and Roop are forced to find new and increasingly desperate ways to survive.

Tiger Hills is a sweeping multigenerational story set in a coffee plantation in Coorg, southern India, in the 19th Century. The novel begins with the birth of Devi, a special child, who befriends a young boy whose mother has died in tragic circumstances. Devi and Devanna become inseparable as they go to school together and learn more about the extended family that surrounds them. Things change when Devi meets Muthi, a young man who has killed a tiger and is feted as a hero.

Nazneen's inauspicious entry to the world, an apparent stillbirth on the hard mud floor of a Bangladeshi village hut, imbues in her a sense of fatalism that she carries across continents when she is married off to Chanu. Her life in London's Tower Hamlets is, on the surface, calm. For years, keeping house and rearing children, she does what is expected of her. Yet Nazneen walks a tightrope stretched between her daughters' embarrassment and her husband's resentments.