Tania Rodrigues

One night in the reform club, Phileas Fogg bets his companions that he can travel across the globe in just eighty days. Breaking the well-established routine of his daily life, he immediately sets off for Dover with his astonished valet Passepartout. Passing through exotic lands and dangerous locations, they seize whatever transportation is at hand - whether train or elephant - overcoming set-backs and always racing against the clock.

Maryam and Zahra. In 1988 Karachi, two fourteen-year-old girls are a decade into their friendship, sharing in-jokes, secrets and a love for George Michael. As Pakistan’s dictatorship falls and a woman comes to power, the world suddenly seems full of possibilities. Elated by the change in the air, they make a snap decision at a party. That night, everything goes wrong, and the two girls are powerless to change the outcome. Zahra and Maryam. 

In present-day London, two influential women remain bound together by loyalties, disloyalties, and the memory of that night, which echoes through the present in unexpected ways. Now both have power; and both have very different ideas of how to wield it… Their friendship has always felt unbreakable; can it be undone by one decision?

Meili, a young peasant woman living in the remote heart of China, is married to Kongzi, a distant descendant of Confucius. Desperate for a son to carry on his illustrious family line, Kongzi gets Meili pregnant without waiting for official permission. When family planning officers storm the village to arrest violators of the population control policy, the family escape to the Yangtze River and begin a fugitive life.

Autumn 1928. Three young women are on their way to India, each with a new life in mind. They all have their own reasons for leaving their homeland, but the hopes and secrets they carry can do little to prepare them for what lies ahead. Richard & Judy Bookclub

In early 2020, junior doctor Roopa Farooki lost her sister to cancer. But just weeks later, she found herself plunged into another kind of crisis, fighting on the frontline of the battle taking place in her hospital, and in hospitals across the country. Everything is True is the story of Roopa's first forty days of the Covid-19 crisis from the frontlines of A&E and the acute medical wards, as struggling through her grief, she battles for her patients' and colleagues' survival.

Working thirteen-hour shifts, she returns home each evening to write through her exhaustion, chronicling the devastating losses and slowly eroding dehumanisation happening in real time on the ward. At once an unflinching insider's account of medicine in the time of coronavirus, and the devastating story of a sister's grief, Everything is True is an exhilarating memoir of holding on to that which makes us human against insurmountable odds. 

How has feminism developed? What have feminists achieved? What can we learn from the global history of feminism? Feminism is the ongoing story of a profound historical transformation. Despite being repeatedly written off as a political movement that has achieved its aim of female liberation, it has been continually redefined as new generations of women campaign against the gender inequity of their age.

In this absorbing book, historian Lucy Delap challenges the simplistic narrative of 'feminist waves' - a sequence of ever more progressive updates -- showing instead that feminists have been motivated by the specific concerns of their historical moment. Drawing on an extraordinary range of examples from Japan to Russia, Egypt to Germany, Delap explores different feminist projects to show that those who are part of this movement have not always agreed on a single programme. This diverse history of feminism, she argues, can help us better navigate current debates and controversies. A tour de force from an award-winning expert, Feminisms shows that a rich relationship to the past can infuse today's activism with a sense possibility and inspiration.

Feeling lost and alone in a strange new city, Leelu wishes she could fly away back home – her real home where her dad is, thousands of miles away. London is cold and grey and the neighbours are noisy and there’s concrete everywhere. But Leelu is not alone; someone is leaving her gifts outside her house – wonders which give her curious magical powers. Powers which might help her find her way home . . .

Reeva Mehta is thriving. Consumed in her career as one of London's top divorce lawyers, she doesn't bat an eyelid when her mum calls to tell her that her dad is dead. Because he's been dead since she was five… hasn't he?

If finding out her dad was alive - until last week - wasn't bad enough, his last request was for his daughters to spend fourteen days in mourning at his house. Which means Reeva must spend a fortnight stuck with the people who betrayed her when she needed them the most - her sisters.

Could confronting the truth help the Mehtas put aside their differences, or will attending a funeral be the death of this family?

Every year on Leila's birthday Shalini kneels by the wall and scoops dry earth to make a pit for two candles. One each for herself and for Riz, the husband at her side. But as Shalini walks from her vigil, the man beside her melts away. It is sixteen years since they took her, her daughter's third birthday party, the last time she saw the three people she loves most dearly: her mother, her husband, her child.

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, ten 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.

The insights revealed in this book will help you understand some of the factors that may be sabotaging your efforts to make more space. It will inspire you to take action and create a home that you love, that loves you back - a home that reflects who you are and the life you want to live.

You'll never look at your clutter - or your home - the same way again.

1914: Young Anton Heideck has arrived in Vienna, eager to make his name as a journalist. While working part-time as a private tutor, he encounters Delphine, a woman who mixes startling candour with deep reserve. Entranced by the light of first love, Anton feels himself blessed. Until his country declares war on hers.

1927: For Lena, life with a drunken mother in a small town has been impoverished and cold. She is convinced she can amount to nothing until a young lawyer, Rudolf Plischke, spirits her away to Vienna. But the capital proves unforgiving. Lena leaves her metropolitan dream behind to take a menial job at the snow-bound sanatorium, the Schloss Seeblick. 

1933: Still struggling to come terms with the loss of so many friends on the Eastern Front, Anton, now an established writer, is commissioned by a magazine to visit the mysterious Schloss Seeblick. In this place of healing, on the banks of a silvery lake, where the depths of human suffering and the chances of redemption are explored, two people will see each other as if for the first time.

In 1876 Sophia Duleep Singh was born into royalty. Her father, Maharajah Duleep Singh, was heir to the Kingdom of the Sikhs, a realm that stretched from the Kashmir Valley to the Khyber Pass and included the mighty cities of Lahore and Peshawar. It was a territory irresistible to the British, who plundered everything, including the fabled Koh-I-Noor diamond.

Exiled to England, the dispossessed Maharajah transformed his estate at Elveden in Suffolk into a Moghul palace. Sophia, god-daughter of Queen Victoria, was raised a genteel aristocratic Englishwoman. But when, in secret defiance of the British government, she travelled to India, she returned a revolutionary and devoted herself to battling injustice and inequality.

Meticulously researched and passionately written, this enthralling story of the rise of women and the fall of empire introduces an extraordinary individual and her part in the defining moments of recent British and Indian history.

Sera Dubash is an upper-class Parsi housewife, and Bhima has worked for her for over thirty years. A crisis will test the ties between Sera and Bhima, and force them to recognise their true loyalties.

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, she's full of questions. 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 ...

What if you didn't have to live with your mistakes?

Across the world, thousands of people are shocked to receive an email telling them that they once chose to have a traumatic memory removed. Now they are being given the chance to get that memory back.

For Mei, William, Oscar and Finn there is a piece missing, but they're not sure what. And each of them must decide if the truth is worth the pain, or better left unknown.

For Noor, who works at the memory clinic Nepenthe, the process of reinstating their patients' memories begins to shake the moral foundations of her world. As she delves deeper into the programme, she will have to risk everything to uncover the true human cost of this miraculous technology.

An exploration of secrets, grief, identity and belonging - of the stories we tell ourselves, and come to rely on, Tell Me An Ending is a sharp, dark and devastating novel about the power and danger of memory.