Showing results by narrator "Sam Dastor" in All Categories

The wonderful fourth outing for Delhi detective Vish Puri. When Ram and Tulsi fall in love, the young woman’s parents are dead set against the union. She’s from a high-caste family; he’s an Untouchable, from the lowest strata of Indian society. Young Tulsi’s father locks her up and promises to hunt down the “loverboy dog.” Fortunately, India’s Love Commandos, a group of volunteers dedicated to helping mixed-caste couples, come to the rescue. But just after they liberate Tulsi, Ram is mysteriously snatched from his hiding place.

Early one morning, on the lawns of a grand boulevard in central Delhi, a group of professionals are attending their therapeutic Laughing Club when a 20-foot apparition of the Goddess Kali appears, and strikes one of their number dead.The goddess disappears without trace, and soon news of the crime has all India agog. For the victim is celebrated sceptic and rationalist Dr Suresh Jha, enemy of all gurus and mystics, and he has been silenced in a manner calculated to unnerve even his most loyal supporters.

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.

Vish Puri is as fond of butter chicken as the next Punjabi. And when there's plenty on offer at the Delhi Durbar hotel where he's attending an India Premier League cricket match dinner, he's the first to tuck in. Irfan Khan, father of Pakistani star cricketer Kamran Khan, can't resist either. But the creamy dish proves his undoing. After a few mouthfuls, he collapses on the floor, dead. Clearly this isn't a case of Delhi Belly. But who amongst the stars, politicians, bureaucrats, and industrialists poisoned Khan is a mystery.

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.

On 14 February 1989, Valentine's Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been "sentenced to death" by the Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time he heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being "against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran". So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team.

An exquisite silver coffee-pot in the shape of a locomotive is on its way to Cardiff in the care of silversmith, Hugh Kellow. When the coffee-pot is stolen and a murder is committed, Inspector Colbeck and Sergeant Leeming are called in to investigate.

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...

A diverse selection of dramas by award-winning writer RC Sherriff Playwright and screenwriter RC Sherriff was best known for his anti-war classic Journey’s End, based on his own experiences of serving on the Western Front. He was a co-writer on several successful screenplays, including The...

Inspector Ghote embarks on one of his strangest cases when he is ordered to prevent a murder - the killing of a precious flamingo in the Bombay zoo. And then there is the racehorse fancied to win the local Derby, which gets replaced by a donkey... Ghote finds things going disastrously as bit by bit he unearths the traces of a monstrous practical joker. But then the fun stops - and Inspector Ghote has a more serious murder on his hands.

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.

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...

Real estate developer Dharmen Shah’s offer to buy out the residents of Vishram Society - a formerly respectable, now crumbling apartment complex that abuts the infamous Dharavi slums - is more than generous. But one man stands in the way of Shah’s luxury high- rise: Masterji, a retired schoolteacher who will not leave his home in Vishram’s Tower A.

Sent to a remote part of India to find out who could benefit from Judge Asif's death, Ghote can get no cooperation from the judge until it becomes evident that the anonymous threats are coming from someone in the judge's household.

Welcome to Kittur, India. Of its 193,432 residents, only 89 declare themselves to be without religion or caste. And if the characters in Between the Assassinations are any indication, Kittur is an extraordinary crossroads of the brightest minds and the poorest morals, the up-and-coming and the downtrodden, and of an India that modern literature has rarely addressed.

This is a story from the Great Explorers collection.

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...

A grisly murder has plunged Bollywood, the film capital of India, into chaos. Ghote gets so caught up with giving an Academy Award-winning performance as a sleuth that the curtain almost comes down on his own life.

British detective writer H. R. F. Keating was best known as the creator of Inspector Ghote of the Mumbai CID. He won two Crime Writers’ Association Gold Daggers, and in 1996 was awarded the Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement. Included here are dramatisations of two of his most popular murder mysteries, set in 1930s India and Victorian London, plus a short clip from Radio 4’s Bookshelf featuring the award-winning author.

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.