Katherine Howard – Joanna Denny
A riveting new biography of a much neglected Queen – the doomed child-bride of Henry VIII. Joanna Denny, the author of Anne Boleyn, reveals another sensational episode in Tudor history – illuminating the true character of Katherine Howard, the young girl caught up in a maelstrom of ambition and conspiracy which led to her execution for high treason while still only seventeen years old.
Who was Katherine, the beautiful young aristocrat who became a bait to catch a king? Was she simply nave and innocent, a victim of her grasping family’s scheming? Or was she brazen and abandoned, recklessly indulging in dissolute games with lovers in contempt of her royal position? Joanna Denny’s enthralling new book once again plunges the reader into the heart of the ruthless intrigues of the Tudor court – and gives a sympathetic and poignant portrait of a girl tragically trapped and betrayed by her own family.
Situated on the left bank of the Ganges, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, Varanasi is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. For Hindus there is nowhere more sacred; for Buddhists, it is revered as a place where the Buddha preached his first sermon; for Jains, it is the birthplace of their two patriarchs. Over the last four thousand years, perhaps no city in the world has stood witness to such a flux of history, from the development of Aryan culture along the Ganges, to invasions that would leave the city in Muslim hands for three centuries, to an independent Brahmin kingdom, British colonial rule, and ultimately independence.
For many years, heartache prevented Nahid Rachlin from turning her sharp novelist’s eye inward: to tell the story of how her own life diverged from that of her closest confidante and beloved sister, Pari. Growing up in Iran, both refused to accept traditional Muslim mores and dreamed of careers in literature and on the stage. Their lives changed abruptly when Pari was coerced by their father into marrying a wealthy and cruel suitor. Nahid narrowly avoided a similar fate, and instead negotiated with him to pursue her studies in America.
The fascinating and revealing story of Frater’s journey through India in pursuit of the astonishing Indian summer monsoon. On 20th May the Indian summer monsoon will begin to envelop the country in two great wet arms, one coming from the east, the other from the west. They are united over central India around 10th July, a date that can be calculated within seven or eight days. Frater aims to follow the monsoon, staying sometimes behind it, sometimes in front of it, and everywhere watching the impact of this extraordinary phenomenon. During the anxious period of waiting, the weather forecaster is king, consulted by pie-crested cockatoos, and a joyful period ensues: there is a period of promiscuity, and scandals proliferate. Frater’s journey takes him to Bangkok and the cowboy town on the Thai-Malaysian border to Rangoon and Akyab in Burma (where the front funnels up between the mountains and the sea). Alexander Frater’s fascinating narrative reveals the exotic, often startling discoveries of an ambitious and irresistibly romantic adventure
While growing up in Versailles, an Indiana farm community, Linda Furiya tried to balance the outside world of Midwestern America with the Japanese traditions of her home life. As the only Asian family in a tiny township, Furiya’s life revolved around Japanese food and the extraordinary lengths her parents went to in order to gather the ingredients needed to prepare it.
