History recorded one woman as Emperor Akbar's Rajput bride. There were two. Twin sisters. One marriage. One night history never knew. Mughal India, 1561. On the eve of a fragile alliance between Rajputana and the court of the young emperor - the man the world would remember as Akbar the Great - Princess Harkha vanishes. She chooses love. She trusts her twin to understand why. Jodha does. And she does not wait to be asked.
She offers. Prepared for the unthinkable, Jodha enters the imperial harem under her sister's name, carrying a secret only four people alive will ever share. With nothing but intelligence, restraint, and an iron will, she must navigate a court of rivals, spies, and seasoned queens - among them the formidable Ruqaiya Sultan Begum, Akbar's first wife - while the emperor she now calls husband begins to see not the name she carries, but the woman carrying it.
Inside Volume One:The night of the substitution, and the secret it leaves behindJodha and Akbar's first encounter, built on concealmentThe rivalry with Ruqaiya Sultan Begum, waged through the court's own machinery - never with a bladeThe quiet rise of a Rajput princess inside the world's most powerful courtHarkha's hidden life beneath it all, and the cost of being forgottenA sweeping slow-burn historical romance set in sixteenth-century Mughal India, Love and Empire is a story of identity, of sacrifice freely given, and of the women whose hidden choices shaped a dynasty.
For readers of Indu Sundaresan's The Twentieth Wife, Alex Rutherford's Empire of the Moghul, and The Other Boleyn Girl - and for anyone who loves court intrigue in the tradition of Wolf Hall, carried to the gilded world of the Mughal court. This is not a story of waiting for love. It is the story of what a woman can build from what remains. Volume One of the Love and Empire trilogy.
History recorded one woman as Emperor Akbar's Rajput bride. There were two. Twin sisters. One marriage. One night history never knew. Mughal India, 1561. On the eve of a fragile alliance between Rajputana and the court of the young emperor - the man the world would remember as Akbar the Great - Princess Harkha vanishes. She chooses love. She trusts her twin to understand why. Jodha does. And she does not wait to be asked.
She offers. Prepared for the unthinkable, Jodha enters the imperial harem under her sister's name, carrying a secret only four people alive will ever share. With nothing but intelligence, restraint, and an iron will, she must navigate a court of rivals, spies, and seasoned queens - among them the formidable Ruqaiya Sultan Begum, Akbar's first wife - while the emperor she now calls husband begins to see not the name she carries, but the woman carrying it.
Inside Volume One:The night of the substitution, and the secret it leaves behindJodha and Akbar's first encounter, built on concealmentThe rivalry with Ruqaiya Sultan Begum, waged through the court's own machinery - never with a bladeThe quiet rise of a Rajput princess inside the world's most powerful courtHarkha's hidden life beneath it all, and the cost of being forgottenA sweeping slow-burn historical romance set in sixteenth-century Mughal India, Love and Empire is a story of identity, of sacrifice freely given, and of the women whose hidden choices shaped a dynasty.
For readers of Indu Sundaresan's The Twentieth Wife, Alex Rutherford's Empire of the Moghul, and The Other Boleyn Girl - and for anyone who loves court intrigue in the tradition of Wolf Hall, carried to the gilded world of the Mughal court. This is not a story of waiting for love. It is the story of what a woman can build from what remains. Volume One of the Love and Empire trilogy.