The author R. Shamla, was born in Anjengo, Trivandrum, Kerala, India on 2nd November 1937. Her early upbringing was done in Kdakkavur and she studied in Sacred Heart English Middle School in Anjengo and in Sree Sethu Parvathy Bai English High School in Kadakkavur. She took her degrees and diploma from Kerala University on 8th April 1967. She was married to Mr.K.K.Abdul Rahiman Kattakath and settled in Kodungallur. She took up jobs as Graduate Teacher, Headmistress, Asst.Educational Officer, Pricipal of CBSE schools in and around Kodungallur and spoken English Instructor. She has been teaching children for more than fifty years. The Little Children of Anjengo is her first novel.

Unexpectedly suspenseful, but written with all the fluency and dark humor of Tom Perrotta's The Wishbones and Joe College, Little Children exposes the adult dramas unfolding amidst the swingsets and slides of an ordinary American playground. Tom Perrotta's thirty-ish parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms of the playground; Sarah, a lapsed feminist with a bisexual past, who seems to have stumbled into a traditional marriage; Richard, Sarah's husband, who has found himself more and more involved with a fantasy life on the internet than with the flesh and blood in his own house; and Mary Ann, who thinks she has it all figured out, down to scheduling a weekly roll in the hay with her husband, every Tuesday at 9pm. They all raise their kids in the kind of sleepy American suburb where nothing ever seems to happen--at least until one eventful summer, when a convicted child molester moves back to town, and two restless parents begin an affair that goes further than either of them could have imagined. Perrotta received Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations for best screenplay for the film adaptation of Little Children, which was directed by Todd Field and starred Kate Winslet and Jennifer Connelly.

As he prepared to embark for India in 1774, Alexander Mackrabie's excitement at the sights to be seen and novelties to be experienced was palpable. Mackrabie's journey was conducted under the auspices of the London-based East India Company and was one of the many thousands of Company voyages that brought Europeans into contact with Asian countries and cultures, as well as numerous people and places along the way. Atlantic Voyages tells the story of travellers like Mackrabie as they navigated the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, reflecting on who and what they had left behind in Europe, looking forward to new challenges in Asia, and evaluating the sights and smells, sounds and tastes, hopes and expectations, fears and regrets, that regaled their senses and played on their minds as they sailed along the way. It charts the tension between tedium and terror on the one hand, and exhilaration and excitement on the other, attempting to understand the maritime space of the Atlantic as it was experienced by the people who traversed its waters. The lives of the people carried by East Indiamen were deeply affected by their Atlantic experiences. They confronted the reality of shipboard life: its seasickness and boredom, its cramped living conditions, its questionable dining fare, and its severely restricted privacy. They acclimatised to the rhythms of the ocean and the vicissitudes of the weather. They encountered rites of passage and ceremonies of initiation on the high seas. They prepared themselves for cultural disorientation and a host of unusual sights and sensations. And they wondered at the extraordinary beauty of the elements around them - the sea, the sky, the islands - and the strangeness of their inhabitants, human and animal alike. The ship's passage played a crucial role in shaping the responses and experiences of those individuals surrounded by its wooden walls. Their words bring to life this maritime journey, illuminate the experiences of the people who undertook it, and contribute to our understanding of the place of the Atlantic Ocean in wider histories of the East India Company and the British Empire in this period.