Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry the troubled and bitter Rasheed, who is thirty years her senior. Nearly two decades later, tragedy strikes fifteen-year-old Laila, who must leave her home and join Mariam's unhappy household. With the passing of time comes Taliban rule over Afghanistan, the streets of Kabul loud with the sound of gunfire and bombs. A Thousand Sp ...

Beatrix Potter is not only the author of some of the best loved children’s books of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries; she was also an accomplished botanist, naturalist, and writer, and an extremely talented watercolour painter, and Linda Lear’s biography highlights the less-well-known achievements of this extraordinary woman, showing how they influenced the stor ...