‘Colonel Bakshi burst in, looking very agitated. “Something’s happened to Mrs Basu,” he said. “She’s lying outside in a fl ower bed. I think she’s dead . . .”’ In this marvellous collection of thrilling new stories set in the Mussoorie of a bygone era, Ruskin Bond recounts the deliciously sinister cases of a murdered priest, an adulterous couple, a man who is born evil, and a body in the box-bed, not to forget the strange happenings involving arsenic in the post, strychnine in the cognac, a mysterious black dog, and the Daryaganj strangler. As the elderly Miss Ripley-Bean, her Tibetan terrier, Fluff, the hotel pianist, Mr Lobo, and the owner of the Royal, Nandu, mull over these curious incidents, the reader will be enthralled and delighted—until the very end.

Limits and Renewals, Kipling's last collection of short stories, was written shortly after the death of his only son. Dark and penetrating in tone, these are brilliant portraits of a soul in torment with some welcome relief coming in the tales of 'Aunt Ellen' and 'The Miracle of Saint Jubanus'.

Bound with the author's Soldiers three. Allahabad, 1889.

Here, Kipling describes the life of Englishmen and women in the Indian Subcontinent, and explores the ugly truth of what went on beneath the appealing 'froth' of club life. Instantly rejected by many as being too harsh and too critical, it is in fact a brilliant portrait of Anglo-Indians, and their impact upon the provincial society of Simla.

Presents the further adventures of Mowgli, a boy reared by a pack of wolves, and the wild animals of the jungle. Also includes other short stories set in India.

Rain in the Mountains brings together some of Ruskin Bond’s most beautiful works from his years spent in the foothills of the Himalayas in the town of Mussoorie. Through vivid images and lucid writing, Bond evokes the everyday sights and sounds, and captures the essence of mountain life. The musings on his natural habitat, in both prose and poetry, offer a view of that simple and affable world. Some of his writings featured in the book are ‘Once Upon a Mountain Time’, ‘Sounds I Like to Hear’, ‘How Far Is the River’ and ‘After the Monsoon’. Rain in the Mountains will transport the reader into the quiet world of the mountains, lit with an eternal charm.

Synopsis coming soon.......

A superb storyteller who keeps his readers in thrall’—Statesman It is said that if the smell of the Himalayas creeps into a man’s blood, he will return to the hills again and again. Master storyteller Ruskin Bond shows how this love may persist to death and beyond. The agents of the supernatural may be gentle like the fairy folk in ‘On Fairy Hill’, or malevolent like the well-dressed diners of ‘The Prize’; humorous like the very proper witch, Miss Bellows, in ‘The Black Cat’, or tragic like the haunting Gulabi in ‘Wilson’s Bridge’. Bond aficionados will meet familiar faces in other stories and be thrilled by the gripping mystery, ‘Who Killed the Rani?’ This exciting collection, animated by the brooding presence of the Himalayas, establishes Bond as a connoisseur of the mysterious and macabre.

From William Dalrymple—award-winning historian, journalist and travel writer—a masterly retelling of what was perhaps the West’s greatest imperial disaster in the East, and an important parable of neocolonial ambition, folly and hubris that has striking relevance to our own time. With access to newly discovered primary sources from archives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and India—including a series of previously untranslated Afghan epic poems and biographies—the author gives us the most immediate and comprehensive account yet of the spectacular first battle for Afghanistan: the British invasion of the remote kingdom in 1839. Led by lancers in scarlet cloaks and plumed helmets, and facing little resistance, nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the mountain passes from India into Afghanistan in order to reestablish Shah Shuja ul-Mulk on the throne, and as their puppet. But after little more than two years, the Afghans rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into rebellion. This First Anglo-Afghan War ended with an entire army of what was then the most powerful military nation in the world ambushed and destroyed in snowbound mountain passes by simply equipped Afghan tribesmen. Only one British man made it through. But Dalrymple takes us beyond the bare outline of this infamous battle, and with penetrating, balanced insight illuminates the uncanny similarities between the West’s first disastrous entanglement with Afghanistan and the situation today. He delineates the straightforward facts: Shah Shuja and President Hamid Karzai share the same tribal heritage; the Shah’s principal opponents were the Ghilzai tribe, who today make up the bulk of the Taliban’s foot soldiers; the same cities garrisoned by the British are today garrisoned by foreign troops, attacked from the same rings of hills and high passes from which the British faced attack. Dalryrmple also makes clear the byzantine complexity of Afghanistan’s age-old tribal rivalries, the stranglehold they have on the politics of the nation and the ways in which they ensnared both the British in the nineteenth century and NATO forces in the twenty-first. Informed by the author’s decades-long firsthand knowledge of Afghanistan, and superbly shaped by his hallmark gifts as a narrative historian and his singular eye for the evocation of place and culture, The Return of a King is both the definitive analysis of the First Anglo-Afghan War and a work of stunning topicality.