The Mandel family is rich, powerful and superstitious. Twenty years ago things were very different when they arrived in Calcutta, starving and penniless, intent on making their fortune. Now, Papa Mandel, ruthless architect of the Mandel success story, is dead but his spirit lives on in his unwitting daughter Jayanthi.Jayanthi is an avid reader of romantic magazines, and the plans for her marriage -a marriage of convenience which will further extend the Mandel influence -seem depressingly loveless to her; the more so as the wedding day approaches and increasingly bloody events surround the Mandel clan as they jostle for power.Observing the gathering pandemonium and providing a bemused commentary on events is Police Deputy Babu, a sycophant by nature, whose attempts to gain promotion are continually thwarted, and whose efforts to keep in with the Mandels are largely self-defeating.The violence and scheming and confusion come to a head on the day of Jayanthis wedding -...

In a once great, now falling, mansion live an aristocratic family: Alice, huge, sad and longing for love; her paralysed mother who is subject to wild and eccentric enthusiasms; and the foster child Agnes, whose desire to be an actress sets in motion a train of bizarre and horrifying events.Then love comes to Alice in the form of beautiful but furtive Vincent who has moved in next door. But does he want Alice for herself or for the treasures that she digs from the rubble of her tumbled home? And how does he view Alice's obsession with compost, the making of which she compares to the growth of spiri­tuality and the purging away of sin?Black comedy lurks beneath the surface of this gloriously imaginative new novel from the author of Cobweb Walking, The Wedding of Jayanthi Mandel and The Tea-Planter's Daughter.

As a child-so tiny and delicate that her father calls her fairy-Morgan has a special relationship with nature, for she can hear the Silence, the harmonising force that creates and sustains all things. The humming of the Silence is her secret, even from her beloved father, as is the day that she walks along a cobweb.But with adolescence comes a loss of childhood innocence and the intrusion into her perfect world of an unwanted step­mother and baby sister. These loud and chaotic presences, together with an act, as she perceives it, of unwarranted violence by her father, have a traumatic effect on Morgan. Sent by her father to get help-for the family has been trapped in a fall-out shelter for days-Morgan, a dwarf, goes instead on an odyssey into the unknown, seemingly hostile, world outside her home.Mourning the disappearance of magic from her life and realising for the first time that she is physically deformed, Morgan learns that only through love can she regain her...

It is the Second World War and the human race stands at the crossroads: self-destruction or a glorious evolutionary step to higher consciousness.In the grand and moated Plague House, served since the start of the war only by the spiteful charlady, Mrs Lovage, live beautiful Elizabeth and her thirteen-year-old twins -plump pyromaniac George and Sissy, always struggling with her mother for her brother's love. Into this strange household comes Lump - otherwise known as Hush - intent on saving the world. But initial confidence wavers as stress, conflict, fire and death are encountered in an inspired and memorable finale.From the author of Cobweb Walking, The Wedding of Jayanthi Mandel, The Tea-Planter's Daughter and Shining Agnescomes a wonderfully mythic and vibrant novel of the imagination.

A rich and dramatic story of a poor young Indian boy who fights like a tiger to achieve fame and fortune. In a village just outside present-day Calcutta, Koonty, a young girl, is squatting in pain beside the river, convinced that her agony is the result of a fish allergy. It's not â?? she's giving birth and as the realisation dawns on her, she makes the connection with the encounter she had all those months ago with the swimming stranger with the golden bathing shortsâ?¦Horrified, she places the baby onto a piece of floating debris, fixes her own necklace around his neck and pushes him downriver. Several miles downstream in Calcutta, the baby is discovered by Dolly, a young married woman desperate for a child. She takes him home and brings him up as her own son, calling him Karna. And so begins a chain of events which sees Karna's initial good fortune turn to tragedy so that, years later, he's forced to seek out Koonty, now married and with a son of her ownâ?¦

When Sangita, Ranee of Bidwar, is caught up in a scandal, her husband, the Raja, banishes her from the palace and forbids access to her son, Anwar, still a babe in arms. She lives miserably as a disgraced woman, praying to the god Ganesh that he will take Anwar from her husband, so that he would know her suffering. Then, Anwar goes missing.In a hill-tribe far above the palace, on land impenetrable to man, the young males were dying. When they come across a Coarseone—a child from civilisation below—in the lower jungle, they use him to create a new life—a male who will become their Maw, their king.The Ama stone—the stone of life—was kept by the hill-tribe at the foot of the mountain in a hammocked shrine. When Sangita, scouring the jungle for her son, finds it, it burns her skin causing her to drop it, losing it without trace, but not before it sends her a message: Anwar has returned to her womb.

Today is Julia Clockhouse's twenty-fifth birthday. Her long-suffering Hindu servants are frantically trying to organise a party for her, but it's hard to do so amid the havoc wreaked by her wild spirit. They think she is possessed. Daughters of colonial tea-planters shouldn't have souls that escape their bodies, move objects with their minds, hear tongueless yogis speak. Julia Clockhouse does.As the day passes and the chaos mounts in the kitchen, Julia listens desperately for the return of her husband. Ben may have married her on the orders of her domineering father, but he had come to love her; together they had found the happiness they missed in childhood. But by the time the party guests are tumbling in from the rising fury of the monsoon Ben has still not come.Sara Banerji narrates the events of an extraordinary birthday with deft humour and haunting eloquence, weaving into Julia's story a picture of an isolated tea-plantation and all those who live there. The...

When Hermione - eccentric, seventy and returned from India to a 'safe' life in the Home Counties - encounters Slug street-painting on the pavement, she employs him as assistant gardener. Slug, who has the motto ' Never Grow Old' tattooed across his head, will soon sort out Gerald, the pin-striped head gardener, soften his ruthless marshalling of her plants and introduce a more effusive atmosphere to her estate.But when Hugh, Hermione's huge husband, dies, Slug's skinhead cronies begin to threaten her peace, and Hermione retreats to the chaos of India, chasing the memories of her previous life. What happened to the young Indian with whom she fell passionately in love when she was nineteen, and who had insisted that she marry the more ' suitable' Hugh? Can she recreate the dream of over fifty years ago?Writing on Skin is blackly comic in its humour and sweeping in its imaginative scope.