Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865 and spent his early years there, before being sent, aged six, to England, a desperately unhappy experience. Charles Allen's great-grandfather brought the sixteen-year-old Kipling out to Lahore to work on The Civil and Military Gazette with the words 'Kipling will do', and thus set young Rudyard on his literary course. And so it was that at the start of the cold weather of 1882 he stepped ashore at Bombay on 18 October 1882 - 'a prince entering his kingdom'. He stayed for seven years during which he wrote the work that established him as a popular and critical, sometimes controversial, success. Charles Allen has written a brilliant account of those years - of an Indian childhood and coming of age, of abandonment in England, of family and Empire. He traces the Indian experiences of Kipling's parents, Lockwood and Alice and reveals what kind of culture the young writer was born into and then returned to when still a teenager. It is a work of fantastic sympathy for a man - though not blind to Kipling's failings - and the country he loved.

WINNER OF THE VIRGINIA PRIZE FOR FICTION As young children, Rudyard and his sister ‘Trix’ flourished in the brilliant warmth and colour of India. Their happiness ended abruptly when they were sent back to England to live with a strict and god-fearing foster family. Both became writers, although one lived in the shadow of the other’s extraordinary success. The name Rudyard Kipling is known to millions, but what became of his talented younger sister? She was careful to hide her secret life even from those closest to her. Mary Hamer’s fascinating novel brings both Kipling and Trix vividly to life. In this fictionalised account of their lives, she goes to the heart of the relationship between a difficult brother and his troubled sister. Hamer peels back the historical record to reveal the obsessions which fuelled Kipling and his sister. Was he really better equipped to deal with conflict, heartbreak and loss than his beloved Trix? Review 'A historical delight' -Waterstones 'Hamer's book opens up the complex world of the Kiplings, moving between continents and momentous world events' -Daily Mail 'Illuminating new study... She writes clearly, pleasantly, and with a blessed absence of jargon.' -Times Literary Supplement 'Mary Hamer's Kipling and Trix elegantly walks the borders between fact and fiction in her retelling of Rudyard Kipling's story and his relationship with his sister Trix' - Historical Novel Society 'The childhood scenes are particularly compelling, revealing how brother and sister, though dependents, were gradually becoming rivals....The book is a rich collage of potent scenes - you shift viewpoint and we see Rud and Trix through the eyes of many others.' - Pam Johnson, Words Unlimited About the Author Mary Hamer was born in Birmingham. After reading English at Oxford she taught for the next twenty years and published works of non-fiction, before embarking at last on the adventure of imaginative writing.Kipling and Trix is her fifth book and first novel. Mary travels widely and has lectured in many countries. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the Guardian and the Independent. She has contributed to television and radio programmes, such as 'In Search of Cleopatra', Women's Hour and Night Waves. Mary is the Chair of the Kipling Society in London.

Sahib is a magnificent history of the British soldier in India from Clive to the end of Empire, making full use of personal accounts from the soldiers who served in the jewel in Britain’s Imperial Crown.

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865 and spent his early years there, before being sent, aged six, to England, a desperately unhappy experience. Charles Allen's great-grandfather brought the sixteen-year-old Kipling out to Lahore to work on The Civil and Military Gazette with the words 'Kipling will do', and thus set young Rudyard on his literary course. And so it was that at the start of the cold weather of 1882 he stepped ashore at Bombay on 18 October 1882 - 'a prince entering his kingdom'. He stayed for seven years during which he wrote the work that established him as a popular and critical, sometimes controversial, success. Charles Allen has written a brilliant account of those years - of an Indian childhood and coming of age, of abandonment in England, of family and Empire. He traces the Indian experiences of Kipling's parents, Lockwood and Alice and reveals what kind of culture the young writer was born into and then returned to when still a teenager. It is a work of fantastic sympathy for a man - though not blind to Kipling's failings - and the country he loved.

There has been a resurgence of interest in Kipling among critics who struggle to reconcile the multiple pleasures offered by his fiction with the controversial political ideas that inform it. Peter Havholm takes up the challenge, piecing together Kipling's understanding of empire and humanity from evidence in Anglo-Indian and Indian newspapers of the 1870s and 1880s and offering a new explanation for Kipling's post-1891 turn to fantasy and stories written to be enjoyed by children. By dovetailing detailed contextual knowledge of British India with informed and sensitive close readings of well-known works like 'The Man Who Would Be King',' Kim', 'The Light That Failed', and 'They', Havholm offers a fresh reading of Kipling's early and late stories that acknowledges Kipling's achievement as a writer and illuminates the seductive allure of the imperialist fantasy.

"A series of letters purporting to be written by an East Indian officer wounded in France to his relatives at home." - New York Times Book Review, Oct. 20, 1918.

This book explores and re-evaluates Kipling’s connection with India, its people, culture, languages, and locales through his experiences and his writings. Kipling’s works attracted interest among a large section of the British public, stimulating curiosity in their far-off Indian Empire, and made many canonize him as an emblem of the ‘Raj’. This volume highlights the astonishing social and thematic range of his Indian writings as represented in The Jungle Books; Kim; his early verse; his Simla-based tales of Anglo-Indian intrigues and love affairs; his stories of the common Indian people; and his journalism. It brings together different theoretical and contextual readings of Kipling to examine how his experience of India influenced his creative work and conversely how his imperial loyalties conditioned his creative engagement with India. The 18 chapters here engage with the complexities and contradictions in his writings and analyse the historical and political contexts in which he wrote them, and the contexts in which we read him now. With well-known contributors from different parts of the world – including India, the UK, the USA, Canada, France, Japan, and New Zealand – this book will be of great interest not only to those interested in Kipling’s life and works but also to researchers and scholars of nineteenth-century literature, comparative studies, postcolonial and subaltern studies, colonial history, and cultural studies.