Rosie Thomas – författare

An epic love story and adventure set against the stunning backdrop of Antarctica.Alice Peel is a geologist. She believes in observation and proof. But now she stands alone on the deck of a rickety Chilean ship as a stark landscape reveals itself. Instead of the familiar measurable world, everything that lies ahead of her is unknown and unpredictable.Six weeks earlier her life was comfortably unfolding in an Oxford summer. Then, with her relationship suddenly in pieces, she accepted an invitation to join a group working at the end of the earth: Antarctica.James Rooker is a man on the run. He's been running since his childhood in New Zealand. Now, there is nowhere further to go. He has taken a job working on the same small Antarctic research station.Alice discovers an ice-blue and silver world, lit by sunlight. Nothing has prepared her for the beauty of it, or the claustrophobia of a tiny base shared with eight men and one other woman. The isolation wipes out everyone's past, and tension crackles in the air. But there is a jolt of recognition between Alice and Rooker that is like nothing she has ever known. And it is in Antartica that she discovers something else that will change her life forever … if she survives.

A gripping, exotic and epic tale for fans of Dinah Jeffries and Victoria HislopThe unexpected arrival of her willful teenage granddaughter, Ruby, brings life and disorder to 82-year-old Iris Black’s old house in Cairo. Ruby, driven away from England by her fraught relationship with her own mother, is seeking refuge with the grandmother she hasn’t seen for years.An unlikely bond develops as Ruby helps Iris document her fading memories of the glittering, cosmopolitan Cairo of World War Two, and of her one true love – the enigmatic Captain Xan Molyneux – whom she lost to the ravages of war.This lost love shaped Iris’s past – and will affect Ruby’s future in ways they could not have imagined…

The new novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Iris and Ruby.Connie Thorne was a foundling, a child left by her mother for strangers to find. Forty years on, without ever being able to discover her true identity, she has put all her energy into creating a flawless shell for herself.As a child, she was musical, her sister Jeanette was deaf. One of them was dark, the other sunny. Yet they both fell in love with the same man. And her feelings for Bill, Jeanette's husband, are the one part of herself that Connie can never reshape.When she hears the news that her sister is dying, the last thing Connie wants is to leave her Bali home and return to London. But with the bitterness of betrayal still between them, Connie and Jeanette have to learn to forgive each other.Surrounded by family, can Constance make her peace with who she really is – and who she loves?

From the bestselling author of Iris and Ruby comes a novel in which a group of old friends reunite to start a new stage of their lives.Miranda Meadowe decides a lonely widowhood in her crumbling country house is not for her. Reviving a university dream, she invites five of her oldest friends to come and join her to live, and to stave off the prospect of old age. All have their own reasons for accepting.To begin with, omens are good. They laugh, dance, drink and behave badly, as they cling to the heritage they thought was theirs for ever: power, health, stability. They are the baby boomers; the world is theirs to change. But as old attractions resurface alongside new tensions, they discover that the clock can’t be put back.When building work reveals an Iron Age burial site of a tribal queen, the outside world descends on their idyllic retreat, and the isolation of the group is breached. Now the past is revealed; and the future that beckons is very different from the one they imagined.

For fans of The Tea-Planter’s Wife and Victoria Hislop comes a gripping story of doomed love and secrets in 1940s Kashmir. Within one exotic land lie the secrets of a lifetime… In 1938, young bride Nerys Watkins accompanies her missionary husband on a posting to India. Up in Srinagar, the British live on beautiful wooden houseboats and dance and gossip as if there is no war. But when the men are sent away to fight Nerys is caught up in a dangerous friendship.Years later, when Mair Ellis clears out her father’s house, she finds an antique shawl with a lock of child’s hair wrapped up in its folds. Tracing her grandparents’ roots back to Kashmir, Mair uncovers a story of great love and great sacrifice.

From the bestselling author of the phenomenally successful The Kashmir ShawlLondon 1885As a turbulent and change-filled century draws to a close, there has never been a better time to alter your fortune. But for a beautiful young woman of limited means, Eliza’s choices appear to lie between the stifling domesticity of marriage or a downwards spiral to the streets – no matter how determined she is to forge her own path.One night at a run-down theatre, she meets the charismatic Devil Wix – showman, master of illusion, fickle friend. Drawn into his circle, Eliza becomes the catalyst of change for his colleagues – a dwarf, an eccentric engineer, and an artist – as well as Devil himself. And as Eliza embarks on a dangerous adventure, she must decide which path to choose, and how far she should go when she holds all their lives in her hands.

A stunning novel from the SUNDAY TIMES bestselling author of THE KASHMIR SHAWLLondon 1919Born into a down-at-heel family, Nancy Wix is more than her past dictates – more ambitious than the daughter of a faded showman, more original than a woman who will be confined by polite conventions. The end of the Great War has left a stricken London on the brink of an uncertain future, and with their hard-won freedoms now in doubt Nancy and her fellow suffragettes must strive all over again for the right to control their own destinies.At a time when shattered families are struggling to let go of their dead, Nancy discovers she has a gift that offers hope to the loved ones of the lost generation, and a chance encounter reveals a way in which she might use it for her own ends.As Nancy struggles to break free from the rigid bonds of society and find her place in the world, the only thing that could hold her back is her love for an unattainable man…

From the bestselling author of The Kashmir Shawl Dinah Steward has a secret. Hidden beneath the comfortable family life she shares with her successful husband Matthew and their two sons lies a shameful secret that has haunted Dinah for fifteen years. She and Matt never speak of it or the impossible choice he forced her to make all those years ago: they think the cracks have been papered over.But when a chance encounter brings the past into sharp focus once more, Dinah realises she can no longer deny the truth. She decides to risk everything – her husband, her sons, her perfect lifestyle, in order to claim what was always hers.

‘Terrific stuff . . . a real weepy’ The Times One Love. One Chance. Once Sacrifice.For Sam McGrath a brief encounter with a young woman, on a turbulent flight, changes his life. On impulse, crazily attracted to her, her vows to follow her – all the way to Nepal.Finch Buchanan is flying out as doctor to an expedition. But when she reaches the Himalayas she will be reunited with a man she has never been able to forget.Al Hood has made a promise to his daughter. Once he has conquered this last peak, he will leave the mountains behind forever.Everest towers over the group, silent and beautiful. And the passionate relationship between Finch, Al and Sam – two men driven by their own demons, and a woman with a dream of her own – begins to play itself out, with tragic consequences . . .

From the bestselling author of The Kashmir Shawl.Olivia Giorgiadis has left her English roots behind. She lives on a tiny Greek island, married to a local man, mother to two small sons. Year on year, island life has followed a peaceful unchanging rhythm.Until now. An earthquake ravages the coast, its force devastating the island. In the aftermath comes a stranger: an Englishwoman, destitute but for the clothes she wears.Olivia welcomes the stranger into her home, the potter's house. But as Kitty melts into the family and the village community, so Olivia begins to sense that her mysterious visitor threatens all she holds dear…

From the bestselling author of The Kashmir Shawl They were three modern women. They came to Oxford University full of hopes and dreams and would leave forever changed.Helen: shy, quiet and hopelessly in love with Lord Oliver Mortimore, the dazzling, self-destructive blond who lives for fast cars, drink and drugs.Chloe: glamorous and confident, abandoning a high-powered career and broken affair, obsessively drawn to her philandering English professor.Pansy: stunning heiress and aspiring actress, driven to prove she is more than an irresistible magnet to the men who flock to her.Together for one unforgettable year, they would share a lifetime of emotions and a very special friendship…

From the bestselling author of The Kashmir Shawl Born into an aristocratic family, beautiful Amy Lovell leads a whirlwind life of extravagant parties and debutante balls.But Amy, curious about the world beyond the narrow confines of her class, is ill-suited to a life of indulgence. Eagerly embracing a nursing career, she is drawn into the radical politics of the day.As the spectre of war looms, Amy's bittersweet love for the proud miner Nick Penry – a love which defies the differences between them – leads them to the conflict in Spain, where love and pain become inseparable agonies.

Through an exploration of subjects such as Gandhi impersonators, "God-men," performance artists, and participants in ritual enactments of sacred stories through dance and theatre, Mimetic Desires makes an intervention toward understanding the phenomenon of impersonation and guising in South Asia and the world. This volume defines impersonation as the temporary assumption of an identity or guise in performance that is perceived to be not one’s own, regardless of whether this assumption is deliberate, intentional, and conscious or not. Interrogating the legitimacy of the purported dialectic between the "real/original" and "fake/dupe," Mimetic Desires refutes any ordering of identity along the lines of a binary or dichotomy that presupposes the myth of an original identity. Guising captures sartorial and kinetic play more generally. By peeling back the layers of performative masks to reveal the process of the masquerade itself, we can see that those with the most social capital are often those with the most power and opportunities to impersonate "up"—and "down"—social hierarchies. The twelve chapters in Mimetic Desires disclose sites and processes of socio-political power facilitated by normative markers of social status relating to race, ethnicity, gender, caste, class, and religion—and how those markers can be manipulated to express and enhance individual and group power. The first comprehensive study to focus on impersonation in South Asia, Mimetic Desires expands on previous scholarship on impersonation and guising in vernacular theatre, dance, public processions, and religious ritual. It is particularly in conversation with the robust scholarship on gender performance and trans-kothi-hijra engagement in theatrical and dance forms in South Asia. Mimetic Desires explores some of the contexts and forms of impersonation in South Asia, with its remarkable array of performing arts, to gain insight into the very human and quotidian practices of impersonation and guising.

Traces the development of Indian cinema from the 1920s to the mid-1990s, before "Bollywood" erupted onto the world stage.Bombay before Bollywood offers a fresh, alternative look at the history of Indian cinema. Avoiding the conventional focus on India's social and mythological films, Rosie Thomas examines the subaltern genres of the "magic and fighting films"-the fantasy, costume, and stunt films popular in the decades before and immediately after independence. She explores the influence of this other cinema on the big-budget masala films of the 1970s and 1980s, before "Bollywood" erupted onto the world stage in the mid-1990s.Thomas focuses on key moments in this hidden history, including the 1924 fairy fantasy Gul-e-Bakavali; the 1933 talkie Lal-e-Yaman; the exploits of stunt queen Fearless Nadia; the magical neverlands of Hatimtai and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp; and the 1960s stunt capers Zimbo and Khilari. She includes a detailed ethnographic account of the Bombay film industry of the early 1980s, centering on the beliefs and fantasies of filmmakers themselves with regard to filmmaking and film audiences, and on-the-ground operations of the industry. A welcome addition to the fields of film studies and cultural studies, the book will also appeal to general readers with an interest in Indian cinema.

On 6th September 1997, Rosie Thomas, mother of two, bestselling author of a dozen novels, nearing fifty years of age, stepped into a Volvo Amazon in Beijing that was to take her half-way across the world. She and her co-driver - nearly twenty years her junior - Phil Bowen, a pearl diver, charter boat skipper and photographer, were set to retrace the run of the first ever international motor rally.The excitement of the daily time challenge, the strange camaraderie, the bickering over who should drive, the dangerous endurance test of miles on dirt roads, up mountains and through deserts, followed by nights spent sleeping outdoors or in flea pit hotels, is more than matched by Rosie's own internal journey, including a near-death experience at the top of the Himalayas.