Showing results by narrator "Tania Rodrigues" in All Categories

Long captivated by the solid yet impermanent nature of ice, by its stark, rugged beauty, acclaimed poet and writer Nancy Campbell sets out from the world’s northernmost museum - at Upernavik in Greenland - to explore it in all its facets. From the Bodleian Library archives to the traces left by the great polar expeditions, from remote Arctic settlements to the ice houses of Calcutta, she examines the impact of ice on our lives at a time when it is itself under threat from climate change.

We've all heard the sayings that girls should be 'sugar and spice and all things nice', while 'boys don't cry'. In Hysterical, Pragya Agarwal dives deep into the history and science that has determined the gendering of emotions to ask whether there is any truth in the notion of innate differences between the male and female experience of emotions. She examines the impact this has on men and women—especially the role it has played in the subjugation of women throughout history—and how a future where emotions are ungendered might look.

Whitman 'Win' Tagore and Leo Milanowski are the greatest love story of our time. International movie star meets the beautiful son of a millionaire. Their kisses write headlines, and their fights break the internet. Nobody needs to know it's not real. Win knows that Hollywood demands perfection - especially from a woman of colour. Leo just wants to enjoy life, and shift press attention away from his dysfunctional family. Together they control the narrative.

In Ruth Davidson's Yes She Can we meet world-beating women from fields as diverse as science, politics, the military, business and sport. They share their own journeys to the top - whether that's becoming Prime Minister, winning an Olympic gold medal or teaching male special forces how to fight. They share the bad times, too, the challenges faced and difficulties to hurdle, explaining what they've learned along the way. We also see the author's own path as she tracks the societal shifts that have seen women advance - and discuss how far we've still got to go.

Worries and anxieties are familiar to us all. Worrying can be helpful when it prompts you to take action and solve a problem, but unrelenting doubts, fears, and negative possibilities can dominate your mind, affect your ability to manage your everyday life and well-being, your sleep and appetite, your social life, and your ability to concentrate. But it doesn't need to be like this; there are ways that you can manage this spiral of unhelpful thoughts and difficult feelings. Overcoming Anxiety explains how to manage anxiety and stop it from taking over.

China, 1923. Evangeline English arrives with her sister to help establish a Christian mission. As they attempt to navigate their new home and are met with resistance, Eva commences work on her book, A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar… In present-day London, Frieda, a young woman adrift in her own life, opens her front door one night to find a man sleeping on the landing. In the morning he is gone, leaving on the wall an exquisite drawing of a long-tailed bird and a line of Arabic script…

From the best-selling authors of The Sugar Girls, G.I. Brides weaves together the real-life stories of four women who crossed the ocean for love, providing a moving true tale of romance and resilience. The ‘friendly invasion' of Britain by over a million American G.I.s caused a sensation amongst a generation of young women deprived of male company during the Second World War. With their exotic accents, smart uniforms and aura of Hollywood glamour, the G.I.s soon had the local girls queuing up for a date, and the British boys off fighting abroad turning green with envy.

Set in London and Tuscany, Someone Wonderful casts a magical net around the lives of six people: Grace Teape; her orphaned niece, Lily; her young lover, sculptor Johnny Cochrane; her photographer brother, Oliver Cary; his journalist wife, Melissa; and their blind son, Sebastian. With irony, elegance, and insight, Barbara Neil explores the limits of our capacity to protect our own in this joyous and heartbreaking novel.

Between the simple melody of running her violin shop and the full-blown orchestra of her romantic interludes in Paris with David, her devoted partner of eight years, Grace Atherton has always set her life to music. Her world revolves entirely around David, for Grace’s own secrets have kept everyone else at bay. Until, suddenly and shockingly, one act tips Grace’s life upside down, and the music seems to stop. It takes a vivacious old man and a straight-talking teenager to kickstart a new chapter for Grace.

In the wake of a traumatic lockdown, Nancy Campbell buys an old caravan and drives it into a strip of neglected woodland between a canal and railway. It is the first home she has ever owned. As summer begins, Nancy embraces the challenge of how to live well in a space in which possessions and emotions often threaten to tumble—clearing industrial junk from the soil to help wild beauty flourish. But when illness and uncertainty loom once more, it is this van anchored in the woods, and the unconventional friendships forged off -grid, that will bring her solace and hope.

From swimming on Hampstead Heath to illicit trysts in hayfields, or counting stock in corner shops and stifling parenting classes to pedicures in Florence, this collection of short stories includes some previously unpublished in audio, and covers the gamut of human nature—our foibles, our loves, our desires, hopes, ambitions and failures. Rich in observation and speckled with a delicious dark humour, Fool for Love confirms Deborah Moggach's place as one of our finest observers of human life.

Years ago, a vast and mysterious object known as the Anomaly was discovered in deep space. All missions to explore and explain it failed. Now, the Anomaly has almost reached Earth, threatening to swallow the planet whole. On an orbital research station, a team of scientists desperately search for a way to stop it or destroy it. One of the crew, Ali, has lost faith in the mission. Following the death of a close friend, her only interest is returning to the ground—to her young son. But strange events, both inside the station and in the void beyond, force Ali to pursue a new mystery.

The personal accounts of three young women who joined up in 1940. In the summer of 1940, Britain stood alone against Germany. The British Army stood at just over one and a half million men, while the Germans had three times that many, and a population almost twice the size of ours from which to draw new waves of soldiers. Clearly, in the fight against Hitler, manpower alone wasn't going to be enough.

Our homes have fascinating stories to tell. The spaces we inhabit and the objects within them reflect many aspects of our lives and our inner selves. In The Secret Life of Clutter, 10 intimate and touching stories take you on a profound journey as people discover what their cluttered homes reveal about their lives and make life-changing shifts when they start to let go and move on.

Tamarind never knew her Indian mum, Chinty, who died soon after she was born. So when she arrives at her ancestral home, a huge mansion in the Himalayas surrounded by luxuriant gardens, she's full of questions for her extended family. But instead of answers, she finds an ominous silence - and a trickle of intriguing clues: an abandoned hut, a friendly monkey, a glowing star ring and a strange girl in the garden who calls herself Ishta. Slowly, Tamarind unravels a mystery at the heart of who she is....

In the dying days of a brutal civil war, Sohail Haque stumbles upon an abandoned building. Inside, he finds a young woman whose story will haunt him for a lifetime to come... Almost a decade later, Sohail’s sister Maya returns home after a long absence to find her beloved brother transformed. While Maya has stuck to her revolutionary ideals, Sohail has shunned his old life to become a charismatic religious leader.

Shifa and her brother, Themba, live in Kairos City with their father, Nabil. The few live in luxury whilst the millions like them crowd together in compounds, surviving on meagre rations and governed by Freedom Fields - the organisation that looks after you, as long as you opt in. The bees have long disappeared; instead children must labour on farms, pollinating crops so that the nation can eat.

Women made their way to India for exactly the same reasons men did - to carve out a better life for themselves. In the early days, India was a place where the slates of 'blotted pedigrees' were wiped clean; bankrupts given a chance to make good; a taste for adventure satisfied - for women. They went and worked as milliners, bakers, dress makers, actresses, portrait painters, maids, shopkeepers, governesses, teachers, boardinghouse proprietors, midwives, nurses, missionaries, doctors, geologists, plant collectors, writers, travellers and - most surprising of all - traders.

As night falls in Delhi, a mother spins tales from her past for her sleeping daughter. Her now grown-up child is a puzzle with a million pieces whom she hopes, through her words and her love, to somehow make whole again. Meanwhile, as the last train from Rajiv Chowk Station pulls away, a young man rides the metro and dreams of murder. In another corner of the city, a newborn wrapped in a blood-red towel lies on the steps of an orphanage as his mother walks away.

Cate Morris and her son, Leo, are homeless. They’ve packed up the boxes from their London home, said good-bye to friends and now they are on their way to Hatters Museum of the Wide Wide World to stay just for the summer. Cate doesn’t want to be there, in Richard’s family home, without Richard to guide her any more. And she knows for sure that Araminta, the retainer of the collection of dusty objects and stuffed animals, has taken against them. But they have nowhere else to go. They have to make the best of it. But Richard hasn’t told Cate the truth about his family’s history.