Showing results by narrator "Sam Dastor" in All Categories

The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation - of both human life and the natural environment - and the origin of our contemporary climate crisis. Tracing the threats to our future to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean, The Nutmeg's Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. The story of the nutmeg becomes a parable revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials.

A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that can symbolize his independence.

In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency”, V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left 100 years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past. 

Meet Vish Puri, India’s most private investigator. Portly, persistent and unmistakably Punjabi, he cuts a determined swathe through modern India’s swindlers, cheats and murderers.In hot and dusty Delhi, where call centres and malls are changing the ancient fabric of Indian life, Puri’s main work comes from screening prospective marriage partners, a job once the preserve of aunties and family priests

London, 1841. Mr Jeremiah Blake and Captain William Avery, recently returned from India, are invited by Viscount Allington to examine the particulars of a grisly pair of murders. Two printers from the seditious gutter presses have been brutally dispatched in distinct but similar circumstances. Fearing the deaths will stoke the fires of Chartism sweeping the capital, Allington hopes Blake and Avery's determination to uncover the truth will solve these crimes and help restore civic order.

Here are the stories of nine great adventures and the lives of the men who took part in them. They pushed back the frontiers of man's knowledge of the world by their vision, courage, and sheer doggedness. They were very different people, from bold adventurers facing the unknown with enjoyment to careful, more scientific individuals. Their journeys are placed within their historical context, but also contain the words of the men themselves.

The Railway Detective faces his most dangerous adversary yet. It is 1852, and Inspector Robert Colbeck and his assistant Sergeant Victor Leeming are faced with their most complex and difficult case to date. As a train speeds over the Sankey Viaduct, a man is hurled from a carriage and plummets into the canal below. It later transpires that he has been stabbed to death. With no papers by which to identify the man, the detectives' investigation is hampered from the start. Suspecting that the victim may have come from continental Europe, Colbeck and Leeming take the case to France where a new railway is being built by a British contractor.

When a young woman comes forward saying she’s the reincarnation of Riya Kaur, a wife and mother who vanished during the bloody 1984 anti-Sikh riots, Puri is dismissive. He’s busy enough dealing with an irate matrimonial client whose daughter is complaining about her groom’s thunderous snoring. Puri’s indomitable Mummy-ji, however, is adamant the client is genuine. How else could she so accurately describe under hypnosis Riya Kaur’s life and final hours?

The wonderful fourth outing for Delhi detective Vish Puri ('the Indian Hercule Poirot' Financial Times). 'These books are little gems. They are beautifully written, amusing, and intensely readable.' - Alexander McCall Smith When Ram and Tulsi fall in love, the young woman’s parents are dead...

London, 1842. There has been a mysterious and horrible death at the Reform, London's newest and grandest gentleman's club. A death the club is desperate to hush up. Captain William Avery is persuaded to investigate and soon discovers a web of rivalries and hatreds, both personal and political, simmering behind the club's handsome façade - and in particular concerning its resident genius, Alexis Soyer, 'the Napoleon of food', a chef whose culinary brilliance is matched only by his talent for self-publicity.

The First Inspector Ghote Mystery. It is just Inspector Ghote’s bad luck to be landed with solving a seemingly perfect murder at the very start of his career with the Bombay police. For in this baffling crime there is no corpse…. But he also has the cunning tycoon Lala Varde to contend with and the mysterious theft of one rupee from the desk of the Minister of Police Affairs and the Arts.

Jivan Singh, the bastard scion of the Bapuji family, returns to his childhood home after a long absence - only to witness the unexpected resignation of the ageing Devraj Bapuji from the vast corporation he founded, Company India. On the same day, Sita, Devraj's youngest daughter, absconds - refusing to submit to the marriage her father wants for her. Meanwhile, Radha and Gargi, Sita's older sisters, are left to run the Company.... And so begins a brutal, deathly struggle for power, ranging over the Palaces and slums of New Delhi, the luxury resorts and spas of Amritsar and Srinagar.

For nearly 1,000 years, from the destruction of temples and monasteries by Muslim invaders in the 11th and 12th centuries, followed by Hinduism’s increasing power, Buddhism vanished from the country of its origin. Though hugely influential throughout Asia, the religion was forgotten in India.

WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH LONGFORD PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY ‘A narrative of startling originality … As discussions of Britain’s colonial legacy become increasingly polarised, we are in ever more need of nuanced books like this one’ SAM DALRYMPLE, SPECTATOR Rebels Against the Raj...

In September 1939, a 10-year-old boy, Micha Giedroyc watched the Russian security police seize his home in eastern Poland. His father, a senator and judge, was imprisoned while his mother, with Micha and his two sisters, were left on the streets of the local town to fend for themselves. Later they were transported in cattle trucks to the wastes of Soviet Siberia, with hundreds of thousands of other deportees. 'Here, by the will of the rulers of the Soviet Empire, we were to toil and die.'

A comprehensive anthology of dramatisations and readings of Tagore's finest works, plus bonus documentaries Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. A novelist, poet, playwright, composer, artist and philosopher, he wrote both the...

This is a story from the Great Explorers collection.

On the far eastern borders of the Soviet Union, in the sunset of Stalin's reign, soldiers are training for a war that could end all wars, for in the atomic age man has sown the seeds of his own destruction. Among them is Pavel Gartsev, a reservist. Orphaned, scarred by the last great war and...

The assignment was routine - to bring a notorious confidence trickster, arrested in Calcutta, back to Bombay for trial. But Inspector Ghote devised a plan to make it almost a holiday - but Ghote's fellow passengers soon prove anything but restful.

In a small, provincial town in the heart of India, a politician’s wife has done her husband’s career a great service, by dying under suspicious circumstances. That the corpse and the trail have been cold for fifteen years hasn’t saved Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID from being sent to investigate. But what chance does he have when his chief suspect is so powerful, when the whole district is against him, and when a holy man is fasting to the death to protest his prying?