Book review
Rusty, a sixteen-year-old Anglo-Indian boy, is dissatisfied with life in the declining European community at Dehra Dun…

Unhappy with the strict ways of his English guardian, Rusty runs away from home to live with Indian friends. Plunging for the first time into the dream-bright world of the bazaar, Hindu festivals and other aspects of Indian life, Rusty is enchanted...and is lost forever to the prim proprieties of the European community...

‘Like an Indian bazaar itself, the book is filled with the smells, sights, sounds, confusion and subtle organization of ordinary Indian life’
—Santha Rama Rau in the New York Times Book Review

‘Has a special magic of its own’
—Herald Tribune Book Review

‘Considerable charm and spontaneity…’
—San Francisco Chronicle

‘Very engaging…’
—The Guardian

‘Moving in its simplicity and underlying tenderness…a novel of marked originality.’
—The Scotsman

‘Mr Bond is a writer of great gifts…’
—The New Statesman
Paperback/ 146 Pages

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.