Showing results by narrator "Aasiya Shah" in All Categories

India, 1947: Celia Fforbes-Whyte remembers little about her beloved mother, but she will never forget how the family’s prized diamond, the Chamakta Sitara, glistened at her throat. The diamond has been part of the family for as long as she can remember, but growing voices begin to ask whether it should ever have belonged to them at all?

1928. In British-ruled India, headstrong Sita longs to choose her own path, but her only destiny is a good marriage. After a chance meeting with a Crown Prince leads to a match, her family’s status seems secured and she moves into the palace, where peacocks fill the gardens and tapestries adorn the walls. But royal life is far from simple, and her failure to provide an heir makes her position fragile. Soon Sita is on the brink of losing everything, and the only way to save herself could mean betraying her oldest friend …

Meet Kavithri. Outcast. Underdog. Survivor. Kavi is a Taemu. Her people, once feared berserkers and the spearhead of a continent-spanning invasion, are the dregs of Raayan society. Their spirits crushed. Their swords broken. Their history erased. But Kavi has a dream and a plan. She will do whatever it takes to earn a place at the secretive mage academy, face the Jinn within its walls, and gain the power to rise above her station and drag her people out of the darkness.

India, 1926: English Margaret arrives with her new husband Suraj at his family home, set amidst beautiful rolling hills, the air filled with the soft scent of spices and hibiscus flowers. Margaret is unwelcome, homesick and lonely, but her maid Archana, a young woman from an impoverished family, reminds her of her long-lost sister, a tiny glimpse of home in a faraway place.

Luna wants nothing more than to blast off into space and explore the cosmos, but how does she go from a cardboard rocket in her room to running experiments on the ISS? Enter Granny, who’s about to teach Luna just how to make her dream a reality. From discovering what shooting stars are really made of and learning how to complete a spacewalk, to rocket building lessons by Mary Jackson and space shuttle trips with Mae Jamison – Luna and her Granny take us on a crash course adventure into how to become a successful astronaut.

Fatima, Farah, Bubblee and Mae, the four sisters of the Amir family, are sometimes tired of being the only Muslim young women in a rural British village, not helped by their eccentric neighbours, including the hippie nudists next door. Oldest sister Fatima - or, as her family have always nicknamed her, Fatti (which, she worryingly suspects, has just as much to do with her inability to lose weight and guilty-pleasure love of Primula squeezy cheese as it does her birth name) - is having a particularly hard time finding her place in the world.

A devastating fungal pandemic has wiped out most of society. Dayna and Pax live in an isolated house in the countryside with their father, learning to survive in the world left behind. But when their father gets sick they make a choice that changes everything: they summon help from the outside. And they're not prepared for the betrayal that follows . . . Dayna and Pax must race against time across a ruthless landscape to save their father. They won't be able to do it on their own, but who can they trust in a world where survival is everything?

Naeli longs to know her English father but all she has is his name – and his precious violin. Her chance comes when a ticket to England arrives. Leaving behind her beloved India, Naeli embarks on an adventure that will take her from the streets of Victorian London to the wilds of Northumberland to discover the truth of her musical inheritance.