Ruskin Bond is known internationally as one of India's most prolific writers in English for children, young adults, and adults. This literary biography analyzes the impact of personal, social, geographical, political, and literary influences on Bond's worldview, aesthetic principles, and writings. Connecting the development of Bond's writing career over the past 50 years to the evolution of the publishing industry in India, Khorana details the author's pioneering work in the field of children's and young adult literature, and his contribution to diasporic and postcolonial/post-independence literatures. She concludes that it is Bond's versatile, original, and elegant writing in a variety of genres that continue to endear him to readers around the world. According to the author, despite Bond's British background, he does not write about India from a Eurocentric perspective. Having lived the majority of his life in India, he knows the country as an insider, writing with an authenticity and emotional engagement about the land and the people of the Himalayas and small-town India. Khorana analyzes his novels and short stores, and highlights his juxtaposition of his protagonists' individual dramas against larger social, moral, and metaphysical issues. In addition, she reveals how the autobiographical and regional elements in Bond's work provide insight into universal themes such as the tension between past and present, city life versus rural values, the dignity of ordinary folk, preservation of the environment, and living in harmony with nature.

The making of a writer Ruskin Bond's first full-fledged autobiographical book covers his -formative years,' till the age of twenty-one. The world of Anglo-India, with all its conflicting pulls, comes alive as he tells his story. His earliest memoirs are bitter-sweet, and relate to Jamnager where he lives till he is six. The happy hours spent in exploring the Ram Vilas Palace grounds and playing with his younger sister Ellen and the palace children are overshadowed by the acrimonious relation between his parents. Their estrangement while he is still a child leaves him with a life-long sense of insecurity. His unhappiness is exacerbated by the untimely death of his father " his emotional anchor when the author is just ten. Forced to stay with his mother and his stepfather, both of whom are absorbed in their own worlds, he tries to fend off his loneliness through books and the company of a few friends. Left for the most part to himself, the gentle dreamer realizes very early as -a pimply adolescent' his calling as a writer. His first book, The Room on the Roof, materializes in England, the land of his forefathers, where he is sent to make a career for himself. Despite the unexpected success of his novel, which wins a major British literary prize, the author's yearning for India is too powerful to let him remain abroad for long. He returns and begins a writing career which has spanned four decades, and earned him a place in the pantheon of great Indian writers.

Over sixty years, for numerous readers--of all ages; in big cities, small towns and little hamlets--Ruskin Bond has been the best kind of companion. He has entertained, charmed and occasionally spooked us with his books and stories, and opened our eyes to the beauty of the everyday and the natural world. He has made us smile when our spirits are low, and steadied us when we've stumbled. Now, in this brilliantly readable autobiography--his book of books--one of India's greatest writers shows us the roots of everything he has written. He begins with a dream and a gentle haunting, before taking us to an idyllic childhood in Jamnagar by the Arabian Sea--where he composed his first poem--and New Delhi in the early 1940s--where he found material for his first short story. It was a brief period of happiness that ended with his parents' separation and the untimely death of his beloved father. A search for companionship and security, undercut by a fierce independence and a tendency for risk-taking, would inform every choice he made for the rest of his life. With effortless intimacy and candour, Bond recalls his boarding school days in Shimla and winter holidays in Dehradun, when he tried to come to terms with a sense of abandonment, made friends, discovered great books and found his true calling. Determined to be a writer, he spent four difficult years in England, from 1951 to 1955, and he writes poignantly of his loneliness there, even as he kept his promise to himself and produced a book--the classic novel of adolescence, The Room on the Roof. It was born of his longing for 'the atmosphere that was India'--the home he would return to even before the novel was published, taking a gamble that would prove to be the best decision he made. In the final, glorious section of the autobiography, he writes about losing his restlessness and settling down in the hills of Mussoorie, surrounded by generous trees, mist and sunshine, birdsong, elusive big cats, new friends and eccentrics--and a family that grew around him and made him its own. Full of anecdote, warmth and gentle wit; often deeply moving and always with a magnificent sense of time and place--and containing over fifty photographs, some of them never seen before--Lone Fox Dancing is a book of understated, enduring magic, like Ruskin Bond himself.

One of India's finest and most prolific writers, Ruskin Bond has been putting pen to paper for well over six decades. Since The Room on the Roof-his award-winning debut novel which introduced readers to the unforgettable Rusty, the orphan from Dehradun-Bond has created characters both charming and eccentric, which have endured in popular imagination. And, in what is perhaps his most towering achievement, Bond has brought to pulsing life the mountains, valleys and rivers of Garhwal, as well as the quiet magic of small, tucked-away places, in book after book. The Writer on the Hill is a comprehensive selection of Bond's fiction and non-fiction, both popular and little-known. In 'Masterji', a young man meets his old Hindi teacher on a train platform, in handcuffs. In the excerpt from The Room on the Roof, Rusty stands up to his bullying guardian. 'Man and Leopard' describes, in mesmerizing prose, a heart-breaking encounter between man and the wild. And, in 'Once upon a Mountain Time', Bond creates a charming portrait of his little patch of earth in Mussoorie. A tribute to one of the most popular and loved writers of India, The Writer on the Hill is also a celebration of the quiet, unhurried life, lived at one's own pace. This volume will delight Bond's fans everywhere.

From Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling to Satyajit Ray and R. K. Narayan, this text is a collection of spine-chilling tales of the supernatural from India.