Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Limited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks when you make the switch!
Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new membership supporting Tracy Bookshop with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Make the switch
Gift audiobook credit bundles
You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and Tracy Bookshop is supported by your purchase.
Start giftingIn Search of Amrit Kaur
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreBrought to you by Penguin.
As she builds her own life anew, an Italian writer embarks on an all-consuming search for the true story of the mysterious princess H. H. Amrit Kaur of Mandi.
On a sweltering summer day in 2007, having just lost her brother to illness, Livia Manera Sambuy finds herself standing before a 1924 photograph of a stunningly elegant Indian princess at a museum in Mumbai. What's written in the caption will change her life forever. This gorgeous Punjabi princess, it's said, sold her jewels in occupied Paris to save Jewish lives, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp, where she died within a year.
Could it be true? And if so, how could such a sensational story have gone unnoticed? Instinctively, almost viscerally, Manera becomes entangled in the mystery, losing herself in the history of the British Raj, in the diamonds and sapphires of the twentieth-century aristocracy, in the Circus Balls and Jubilees, and in the lives of extraordinary figures such as the Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala, the Jewish banker Albert Kahn, and the Russian explorer Nicholas Roerich-all in a decades-long pursuit of the elusive Amrit Kaur.
When she rendezvouses with the princess's eighty-year-old daughter, Manera's search takes on a new dimension as she strives to reconnect an orphan with the mother who abandoned her in 1933, leaving behind her two children, her raja husband, and a legacy of activism in India's women's civil rights movement.
In Search of Amrit Kaur is an engrossing detective story, a kaleidoscopic history lesson, and a moving portrait of women, across the century, seeking personal freedom.
© Livia Manera Sambuy 2023 (P) Penguin Audio 2023
Livia Manera Sambuy is an Italian writer whose book of profiles of American writers, Non Scrivere Di Me, was published in 2015. She is also the author and co-director of two documentary films on Philip Roth. She has been a staff writer at the literary pages of the Italian national daily Corriere della Sera for over twenty years. She lives in Paris.
Todd Portnowitz is the translator of The Greatest Invention; Long Live Latin; and Go Tell It to the Emperor: The Selected Poems of Pierluigi Cappello, for which he was awarded a Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Reviews
Fascinating Livia Manera is a wonderful detective-companion to lead us through this rich and complex world of princesses and prisoners of war, love and deceit, secrets and discovery... a thoroughly engaging read Nuanced but relentlessly curious, Livia Manera Sambuy has a gift not only for listening to other people's stories but for probing and unfolding exceptional narratives. In Search of Amrit Kaur - an ambitious, absorbing work that peels back the layers of its enigmatic subject and digs deeply into the author's own emotional vicissitudes - is her crowning jewel 'An exemplary sleuth, both astute and open-minded . . . Manera Sambuy writes with impassioned style and insight' 'Remarkable and compelling. I loved this book' Expand reviewsTracy Bookshop is proud to partner with Libro.fm to give you a great audiobook experience.