The younger daughter Roop is something of a psychopath in the making - prone to pulling the wings of insects or otherwise torturing them and to an obsession with blood and death.

And so this British-Iranian woman immersed herself in the history and literature of the period: fixing on objects ( a cooking pot, a quilt sewn with tiny mirrors, resembling a sea of stars), talismans of an entire world that is about to be destroyed. We are thrown into a community of rich and unique characters, Hindu and Muslim, Brahmin and lower-caste, male and female, children and adults. The cherished daughter of an intellectual Brahmin family, Alma, just fourteen and about to be married off when the novel begins, is the main character. Intelligent, observant, compassionate, yet convincingly adolescent, she is an ideal guide, but the two characters whom I found most compelling were Roop, Alma's feral five-year-old sister, and her Kashmiri mother, Ma, a woman ". . . almost too advanced for her age, too intelligent, too liberal," as Razak said in that Telegraph of India interview, "[who] was always going to be punished for just being 100 years too early. She was going to get burnt. Because there was no society to help hold a woman like her at that point in time,” It was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut novels, and is quite an impressive debut, mostly set in Delhi at the time of the partition that created independent India and Pakistan. Whilst it is Partition that drives the book forward, the focus is predominantly on the women. The Guardian review finishes by saying: With its unflinching focus on violence against women, her strong, captivating debut tells a story that is at once firmly rooted in a time and place and yet pressingly relevant to the here and now. Year 5 and 6 pupils at West Park Primary School were tasked with retelling the story of the peppered moth as a Shakespearean sonnetThere are also rites of passage and social history elements to the story, which is at heart a family story. The main protagonists are a prosperous Brahmin family in which the main protagonist Alma and her tomboyish younger sister Roop grow up. Other characters exist mainly to demonstrate the religious and cultural diversity of Delhi. Despite their name, booklice are not considered to be true lice, as they do not feed on a living host. Her younger sister Roop is a free spirited individual with a very quirky personality. Roop sees the world very differently from others in her family. She fears nothing, has a peculiar relationship with death and, as the story progresses, she becomes very important to the family’s survival. Many new photographs have been included, including significant numbers of leaf mines, and those of adult moths are arranged where appropriate in a common orientation with the head to the upper right. UK and Ireland species maps are included for the first time, and a dark line below photographs of adult moths indicates their typical length. Y6 pupils at Miriam Lord Primary School were inspired by the illustrations of Daniel Egnéus from the book ‘Moth’ to create this most stunning collaborative artwork of their own @clpe

Pseudoscorpions such as Chelifer cancroides may live in books and feed on book-eating insects, controlling their numbers. [16] Idiom [ edit ] Moths that feed on cloth will also feed on bookbindings, decaying organic material (which includes paper), and mold. I felt that the last part of this novel was more of a "misery, begets misery, begets misery, begets misery, etc." We know. She did not understand that her setting and time period spoke to that implicitly without having to overexplain or emphasize. This third edition has been significantly expanded so that it includes all species on the British list, approximately 2,500 in total, representing a magnificent achievement by the author, Chris Manley. It also includes updates to the text, improvements to the photographic selection, and extra identification hints. For the leaf-mining micros, photographs are included to demonstrate the all-important feeding signs that can often be a more reliable identification method than seeing the adult.The infighting between religious factions takes an unconscionable toll on the female population that was exceptionally difficult to read about. Razak was brilliant to have used a progressive family to journey through this experience, providing home as a necessary balance to the proliferating injustices. This one really explores not only the cultural divide that was perpetrated by the British that led to serious violence. Equally it explores gender roles within the different cultures and how even educated women struggled in a male dominated society. It also touches upon the caste system and its impact on different people's fortunes. I felt like I learned a lot but was also touched by the different generations of this family and the impact of their decisions as they rippled through the most turbulent time of their lives. And yet, this is the 1940s, and with news of atrocities spilling from Punjab, where religious violence against women in particular grows worse by the day, they’ve let Brahma’s mother – a meddlesome, haunted hater – arrange a match for Alma. Alma parries their anxieties with her own enthusiasm for marriage to the 22-year-old stranger, but even as wedding preparations gather pace, it’s hard to shake the dread instilled by the novel’s dreamlike – nightmarish, really – opening moments. Times are bad for girls in India. The long-awaited independence from British rule is heralding a new era of hope, but also of anger and distrust. Political unrest is brewing, threatening to unravel the rich tapestry of Delhi – a city where different cultures, religions and traditions have co-existed for centuries. Year 6 pupils at Grange Farm Primary School in Coventry worked in small teams to explore the impact of pollution on the peppered moth, natural selection and survival!