Love and Empire. Volume 1

History recorded one woman as Emperor Akbar's Rajput bride. This sweeping novel of the Mughal Empire reveals there were two.

Twin sisters. One marriage. One night history never knew.

Mughal India, 1562. On the eve of a fragile alliance between Rajputana and the court of the young Emperor Akbar - the man history 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 known to only four. With nothing but intelligence, restraint, and an iron will, she must navigate a court of rivals, spies, and seasoned queens - including the formidable Ruqaiya Sultan Begum - while the emperor she now calls husband begins, slowly, to see her.

A sweeping historical romance set in the 16th-century Mughal Empire, Love and Empire is a story of sacrifice, identity, and the women whose hidden choices shaped a dynasty that would change the world.

Inside Volume One:
- The night of the substitution and the secret it leaves behind
- Jodha and Akbar's first encounter, built on concealment
- The slow-burn rivalry with Ruqaiya Sultan Begum, Akbar's senior queen
- The quiet rise of a Rajput princess inside the world's most powerful court
- Harkha's hidden life beneath it all, and the cost of being forgotten

For readers of: Indu Sundaresan's The Twentieth Wife, Alex Rutherford's Empire of the Moghul series, Tanushree Podder's Nur Jahan, and anyone who loves sweeping historical fiction in the tradition of Wolf Hall and The Other Boleyn Girl - transported to the gilded courts of Mughal India.

This is not a story of waiting for love. It is a story of sacrifice, and what a woman can build from what remains.

Volume One of the Love and Empire trilogy.