Book review
Charming tales of the growing-up years from India's best-loved children’s writer

For several decades now, Ruskin Bond’s inimitable stories about Rusty have enthralled and entertained children. Rusty is a quiet, imaginative and sensitive boy who lives in his grandparents’ custody in pre-Independence Dehra Dun. Though he is not the adventurous sort himself, the strangest and most extraordinary things keep happening around him, and so the stories he has to tell are simply fascinating.

The house in Dehra is full of strange creatures. Rusty has to deal with his grandfather’s pet python, who looks into a mirror one day, falls in love with his own reflection, and subsequently spends its days curled up in a narcissistic haze with a dreamy look in its eyes. Also present is the ever-inventive Uncle Ken, who impersonates Hallam, a famous cricketer, in order to get a free lunch at a match, and saunters off after he gets out early. Soon after, visiting his father in wartime Java, Rusty narrowly escapes enemy bombardment, and survives a plane crash in the Arabian Sea. Back in India, he spends his time making friends with an unlikely princess in a lonely tower, encountering a ghost in the garden, and recreating his grandmother’s youthful days from an old photograph. Then, something totally unexpected happens and Rusty is forced to leave Dehra, his future uncertain....

This volume of Rusty stories, the first in a series, traces Rusty’s development from early childhood to his early teens. Arranged in sequence for the first time ever, these stories will be a riveting read for younger and older children alike.


About the author For over forty-five years Ruskin Bond has been writing stories, novellas, essays, poems and children’s books. He has written over 500 short stories and articles, many of which have been published by Penguin India. Ruskin Bond grew up in Jamnagar, Dehradun, New Delhi and Simla. As a young man, he spent four years in the Channel Islands and London. He returned to India in 1955, and has never left the country since. His first novel The Room on the Roof received the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, awarded to a Commonwealth writer under thirty, for ‘a work of outstanding literary merit’. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993, and the Padma Shri in 1999. He lives in Landour, Mussoorie, with his extended family.