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In a world where women have more choices than ever, society nevertheless continues to exert the stigma and pressures of less enlightened times when it comes to having children. We define women by whether they embrace or reject motherhood; whether they can give birth or not. Behavioural Scientist Pragya Agarwal uses her own varied experiences and choices as a woman of South Asian heritage to examine the broader societal, historical and scientific factors that drive how we think and talk about motherhood […]
At the school gates, Faiza fits in. It took a few years, but now the snobbish mothers who mistook her for the nanny treat her as one of their own. She's learned to crack their subtle codes, speak their language of handbags and haircuts and discreet silver watches. You'd never guess, at the glamorous kids' parties and the leisurely coffee mornings, that Faiza's childhood was spent following her parents round the Tooting Cash'n'Carry. When her husband Tom loses his job in finance, he stays calm. Something will come along, and in the meantime, they can live off their savings. But […]
Born in Britain to Indian and Egyptian parents, Princess Sophia Duleep Singh was a prominent suffragette and campaigned for the women’s right to vote. Explore Sophia's incredible life with My Story. Perfect for any child wanting to learn more about history’s untold stories. Great background reading for Key Stage 2 & 3.
Cade and his friends are fighting for Earth. Cade has managed to survive the duel with the Hydra Alpha – barely. But the Games are far from over. By order of the cruel and mysterious alien overlord, Abaddon, Cade and his friends are sent off to war against the Greys, a humanoid race who have far surpassed humans in technology on their home planet. A glimmer of hope? This attempt to move up the leaderboard leads Cade to a game-changing revelation: The Pantheon – the millennia-old alien masterminds behind the Games – have a weakness […]
You get to decide how your lessons are learned and how your story goes. That's the power you have. Life can be relentless, challenging and full of curveballs thrown at us at the worst times, but through these times life will open its hands and offer us the gift of finding out just how powerful we are. Dr Radha, a practising GP and media doctor, provides an inspiring toolbox of reflections and advice to help us reframe the bad stuff and difficulties we face, prevent overwhelm, and learn how to step into our power and trust ourselves […]
30 Things I Love About Myself is the exuberant, witty, irresistible, hilarious and unforgettable story of Nina Mistry, who finds herself accidentally locked in a prison cell on the night of her 30th birthday, where she discovers a tatty little self-help book that will inspire her to take a long hard look at her life, who she really is and what she wants – and to put into action a self-love journey like no other. This is a book for anyone who has ever had a self-worth wobble, or is watching someone they love struggle […]
From the frontlines of the NHS, the story of a junior doctor's love, loss and grief through the Covid-19 crisis In February 2020, junior doctor Roopa Farooki lost her beloved sister to breast 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 forty days of the Covid-19 crisis from the frontlines of A&E, as, struggling through her grief, she battles for her patients' and colleagues' survival […]
In the spring of 2017, 17-year-old Amika George founded the Free Periods movement on behalf of every schoolgirl who couldn’t afford tampons or sanitary towels. Three years later, in January 2020, these products became freely available to every schoolgirl in England for the first time, funded by the government. Anyone can make history, including a teenager launching a global campaign from their bedroom. And Amika will show you how, in this essential guide to being an activist […]
1960s Uganda. Hasan is struggling to run his family business following the sudden death of his wife. Just as he begins to see a way forward, a new regime seizes power, and a wave of rising prejudice threatens to sweep away everything he has built. Present-day London. Sameer, a young high-flying lawyer, senses an emptiness in what he thought was the life of his dreams. Called back to his family home by an unexpected tragedy, Sameer begins to find the missing pieces of himself not in his future plans, but in a past he never knew.
Yasmin Ghorami has a lot to be grateful for: a loving family, a fledgling career in medicine, and a charming, handsome fiancée, fellow doctor Joe Sangster. But as the wedding day draws closer and Yasmin's parents get to know Joe's firebrand feminist mother, both families must confront the unravelling of long-held secrets, lies and betrayals. As Yasmin dismantles her own assumptions about the people she holds most dear, she's also forced to ask herself what she really wants in a relationship and what a 'love marriage' actually means […]
Why are Muslim men portrayed as inherently violent? Does the veil violate women's rights? Is Islam stopping Muslims from integrating? Across western societies, Muslims are perhaps more misunderstood than any other minority. How did we get here? In this landmark book, Tawseef Khan draws on history, memoir and original research to show what it is really like to live as a Muslim in the West. With unflinching honesty, he dismantles stereotypes from inside and outside the faith, and explores why many are so often wrong about even the most basic facts. Bold and provocative, Muslim, Actually is […]
You can't choose who you fall in love with, they say. If only it were that simple. Growing up in Walsall in the 1990s, Huma straddled two worlds – school and teenage crushes in one, and the expectations and unwritten rules of her family's south Asian social circle in the other. Reconciling the two was sometimes a tightrope act, but she managed it. Until it came to marriage. Caught between her family's concern to see her safely settled down with someone suitable, her own appetite for adventure and a hopeless devotion to romance honed from Georgette Heyer, she seeks temporary refuge […]
Karachi. Pakistan's largest city is a sprawling metropolis of 20 million people. It is a place of political turbulence where those who have power wield it with brutal and partisan force, a place where it pays to have friends in the right places and to avoid making deadly enemies. It is a society where lavish wealth and absolute poverty live side by side, and where the lines between idealism and corruption can quickly blur. It takes an insider to know what makes Karachi tick, and in this powerful debut, Samira Shackle explores the city of her mother's birth in the […]
Part memoir, part guide, Burning My Roti is essential reading for a new generation of South Asian women. With chapters covering sexual and cultural identity, body hair, colourism and mental health, and a particular focus on the suffocating beauty standards South Asian women are expected to adhere to, Sharan Dhaliwal speaks openly about her journey towards loving herself, offering advice, support and comfort to people that are encountering the same issues. This provocative book celebrates the strides South Asian women have made, whilst also providing powerful advice through personal stories by Sharan and other South Asian women from all over the world.
Throughout history, people have sought to improve society by reducing suffering, eliminating disease or enhancing desirable qualities in their children. But this wish goes hand in hand with the desire to impose control over who can marry, who can procreate and who is permitted to live. In the Victorian era, in the shadow of Darwin's ideas about evolution, a new full-blooded attempt to impose control over our unruly biology began to grow in the clubs, salons and offices of the powerful. It was enshrined in a political movement that bastardised science, and for sixty years enjoyed bipartisan and huge popular […]
Brown Girl Like Me is an essential guidebook for South Asian women and girls on how to deal with growing up brown, female, marginalized and opinionated. Author Jaspreet Kaur pulls no punches, tackling difficult topics from mental health and menstruation stigma to education and beauty standards, from feminism to cultural appropriation and microaggressions. It will also address tough questions: Can you be a brown feminist without rejecting your own culture? Why are Asian girls the second highest performing group of students in the country, yet this isn’t reflected in universities and head offices? An inspiring memoir and manifesto which aims to […]
Uganda 1972. A devastating decree is issued: all Ugandan Asians must leave the country in ninety days. They must take only what they can carry, give up their money and never return. For Asha and Pran, married a matter of months, it means abandoning the family business that Pran has worked so hard to save. For his mother, Jaya, it means saying goodbye to the house that has been her home for decades. But violence is escalating in Kampala, and people are disappearing. Will they all make it to safety in Britain and will they be given refuge […]
Ex-detective Kamil Rahman is embroiled in a case that might just change his life – for better or for worse... Disgraced detective Kamil Rahman moves from Kolkata to London to start afresh as a waiter in an Indian restaurant. But the peace of his new life is soon shattered. The day Kamil caters an extravagant party, the powerful host, Rakesh, is found dead in his swimming pool. Suspicion falls on Rakesh's young and glamorous new wife, and Kamil is called to investigate for the family. Kamil and Anjoli, his boss's daughter, prove a winning team – yet as the case […]
A wide-ranging and affecting debut novel about family and identity, from an award-winning historian. 1981. Khalid Quraishi is one of the lucky ones. He works nights in the glitzy West End, and comes home every morning to his beautiful wife and daughter. He's a world away from Karachi and the family he left behind. But Khalid likes to gamble, and he likes to win. Twenty pounds on the fruit machine, fifty on a sure-thing horse, a thousand on an investment that seems certain to pay out. Now he's been offered a huge opportunity, a chance to get in early with […]
This actually is a love story, just not the one Sunny was looking for... Sunny is the queen of living a double life. To her friends, she's the entertaining, eternally upbeat, single one, always on hand to share hilarious and horrifying date stories. But while they're all settling down with long-term partners and mortgages, Sunny is back in her childhood bedroom at thirty, playing the role of the perfect daughter. She spends her time watching the Sikh channel, making saag and samosey with her mum, hiding gins-in-a-tin in her underwear drawer and sneaking home in the middle of the night […]
Fox cub siblings Ted and Nancy are on the run from Princess Buttons, the scariest street cat in the Big City. They flee for Grimwood, expecting to find refuge in the peaceful countryside. Instead, they are met with thieving eagles, dramatic ducks, riotous rabbits and a whole host of unusual characters. Grimwood is... weird. But when Princess Buttons tracks them down, Nancy and Ted and the animals of Grimwood must unite in a mind-bending race against time... This memorable, distinctive and warm-hearted comedy series will have kids begging to read more […]
A heart-wrenching and beautifully told debut novel about love, family obligation and finding your way. Nur and Yasmina are in love. They’ve been together for four happy years. But Nur’s parents don’t know that Yasmina exists. As Nur’s family counts down to midnight on New Year’s Eve, Nur is watching the clock more closely than most: he has made a pact with himself, and with his girlfriend, Yasmina, that at midnight he will finally tell his Pakistani parents the truth. That he has spent years hiding his personal life from them to preserve his image as the golden child […]
How do you find hope and even joy in a world that is prejudiced, sexist and facing climate crisis? How do you prepare your children for it, but also fill them with all the boundlessness and eccentricity that they deserve and that life has to offer? In Brown Baby, Nikesh Shukla, author of the bestselling The Good Immigrant, explores themes of sexism, feminism, parenting and our shifting ideas of home. This memoir, by turns heartwrenching, hilariously funny and intensely relatable, is dedicated to the author’s two young daughters, and serves as an act of remembrance to the grandmother they never […]
A priceless manuscript. A missing scholar. A trail of riddles. Bombay, 1950. For over a century, one of the world's great treasures, a six-hundred-year-old copy of Dante's The Divine Comedy, has been safely housed at Bombay's Asiatic Society. But when it vanishes, together with the man charged with its care, British scholar and war hero, John Healy, the case lands on Inspector Persis Wadia's desk. Uncovering a series of complex riddles written in verse, Persis – together with English forensic scientist Archie Blackfinch – is soon on the trail. But then they discover the first body […]
A captivating, powerful and luminous story from a bestselling, award-winning author about a mother, a daughter and the great Greenland shark. Wrapped up in mesmerising illustrations and presented as a deluxe hardback, this is a perfect gift for the holiday season, for 9+ fans of Philip Pullman, Sally Gardner and Frances Hardinge. The shark was beneath my bed, growing large as the room, large as the lighthouse, rising from unfathomable depths until it ripped the whole island from its roots. The bed was a boat, the shark a tide, and it pulled me so far out to sea I was […]
Indian family food with heart My Ammu, mother, is the centre of our family. This book is a tribute to the simple home-cooking from her kitchen in Calcutta. These dishes will bring warmth to your kitchen when you need a quick meal or dish to share with your family and friends. This is the food I cook for my family every day, meals to comfort, restore and nourish. I give these recipes to you, with love.
Why do stories matter? I tell stories to make sense of the world as I see it. The world I have lived and experienced, read about and heard about, and what I want it to be. I tell stories to make sense of myself. Nikesh Shukla, author, writing mentor and bestselling editor of The Good Immigrant, knows better than most the power that every unique voice has to create change. Whether it's a novel, personal essay, non-fiction work or short story – or even just the formless desire to write something – Your Story Matters will hone your skill and […]
Islamophobia is everywhere. It is a narrative and history woven so deeply into our everyday lives that we don’t even notice it – in our education, how we travel, our healthcare, legal system and at work. Behind the scenes it affects the most vulnerable, at the border and in prisons. Despite this, the conversation about Islamophobia is relegated to microaggressions and slurs. Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan reveals how Islamophobia not only lives under the skin of those who it marks, but is an international political project designed to divide people in the name of security, in order to materially benefit global stakeholders […]
There are curries on almost every continent, with a stunning diversity of flavours and textures across India alone, and many more interpretations the world over, including in Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, Trinidad and the UK. But curry is difficult to define. The word has origins in ancient India, but its adoption by Portuguese and British colonisers saw curry reinterpreted in the west to encompass an entire cuisine, prompting many Indians to reject the term outright. Sejal Sukhadwala probes the complex intersection of tradition and colonialism through the fascinating history of curry, from recipes in the Mahabharata to its enduring popularity in […]
Successful London lawyer Jia Khan is a long way from the grubby Northern streets she knew as a child, where her father, Akbar Khan, led the Pakistani community and ran the local organised crime syndicate. Often his Jirga rule – the old way – was violent and bloody, but it was always justice of a kind. Now, with her father murdered, Jia must return to take his place. The police have always relied on the Khan to maintain the fragile order of the streets. But a bloody power struggle has broken out among warring communities and nobody is safe […]
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