Search results for ""Author Alice Albinia""

In her fiction debut, Alice Albinia weaves a multithreaded epic tale that encompasses divine saga and familial discord and introduces an unforgettable heroine. Leela—alluring, taciturn, haunted—is moving from New York back to Delhi. Worldly and accomplished, she has been in self-imposed exile from India and her family for decades; twenty-two years earlier, her sister was seduced by the egotistical Vyasa, and the fallout from their relationship drove Leela away. Now an eminent Sanskrit scholar, Vyasa is preparing for his son’s marriage. But when Leela arrives for the wedding, she disrupts the careful choreography of the weekend, with its myriad attendees and their conflicting desires. Gleefully presiding over the drama is Ganesh—divine, elephant-headed scribe of the Mahabharata, India’s great epic. The family may think they have arranged the wedding for their own selfish ends, but according to Ganesh it is he who is directing events—in a bid to save Leela, his beloved heroine, from Vyasa. As the weekend progresses, secret online personas, maternal identities, and poetic authorships are all revealed; boundaries both religious and continental are crossed; and families are ripped apart and brought back together in this vibrant and brilliant celebration of family, love, and storytelling.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE EDWARD STANFORD TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR''A dazzlingly brilliant book'' Hannah Dawson''Fascinating, often exhilarating ... Albinia is an intrepid, imaginative guide'' TLSThe Britannias tells the story of Britain''s islands and how they are woven into its collective cultural psyche.From Neolithic Orkney to modern-day Thanet, Alice Albinia explores the furthest reaches of Britain''s island topography, once known (wrote Pliny) by the collective term, Britanniae. Sailing over borders, between languages and genres, trespassing through the past to understand the present, this book knocks the centre out to foreground neglected epics and subversive voices.The ancient mythology of islands ruled by women winds through the literature of the British Isles - from Roman colonial-era reports, to early Irish poetry, Renaissance drama to Restoration utopias - transcending and subverting the mo

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'Fantastic - a wonderful book' Lily Cole 'Magical, rich and magnificent' Maxine Peake 'A wild ride! She sees Graves' White Goddess and raises 50 with female magic and transformations' Margaret Atwood 'A rare book, bold and powerful' Xiaolu Guo 'Wild, original...a beautiful work' Neel Mukherjee SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION 2022 NOMINATED FOR THE OTHERWISE AWARD 2022 A storm, a disappearance, a band of women and a remote island where anything is possible. On an unnamed archipelago off the east coast of Britain, Eva Levi has made it her life's work to build a community truly run by women. Now she has disappeared, rumours spread that it will be destroyed. But Cwen will never let that happen. Cwen has been here longer than the civilisation she has returned to haunt. Her name has ancient roots, reaching down into the earth and halfway around the world. The islands she inhabits have always belonged to women. And she will do anything she can to protect them. This remarkable novel is a portrait of female power and female potential, both to shelter and to harm. It reaches into our mythical past and opens up space for us to dream of a radical future.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE EDWARD STANFORD TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR'A dazzlingly brilliant book' Hannah Dawson'Fascinating, often exhilarating ... Albinia is an intrepid, imaginative guide' TLSThe Britannias tells the story of Britain's islands and how they are woven into its collective cultural psyche.From Neolithic Orkney to modern-day Thanet, Alice Albinia explores the furthest reaches of Britain's island topography, once known (wrote Pliny) by the collective term, Britanniae. Sailing over borders, between languages and genres, trespassing through the past to understand the present, this book knocks the centre out to foreground neglected epics and subversive voices.The ancient mythology of islands ruled by women winds through the literature of the British Isles - from Roman colonial-era reports, to early Irish poetry, Renaissance drama to Restoration utopias - transcending and subverting the most male-fixated of ages. The Britannias looks far back into the past for direction and solace, while searching for new meaning about women's status in the body politic. Boldly upturning established truths about Britain, it pays homage to the islands' beauty, independence and their suppressed or forgotten histories.

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10th anniversary edition with new PrefaceOne of the largest rivers in the world, the Indus rises in the Tibetan mountains, flows west across northern India and south through Pakistan. For millennia it has been worshipped as a god; for centuries used as a tool of imperial expansion; today it is the cement of Pakistans fractious union. Five thousand years ago, a string of sophisticated cities grew and traded on its banks. In the ruins of these elaborate metropolises, Sanskrit-speaking nomads explored the river, extolling its virtues in Indias most ancient text, the Rig-Veda. During the past two thousand years a series of invaders - Alexander the Great, Afghan Sultans, the British Raj - made conquering the Indus valley their quixotic mission. For the people of the river, meanwhile, the Indus valley became a nodal point on the Silk Road, a centre of Sufi pilgrimage and the birthplace of Sikhism. Empires of the Indus follows the river upstream and back in time, taking the reader on a voyage through two thousand miles of geography and more than five millennia of history redolent with contemporary importance.

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