Collected Fiction

In a career spanning four decades, Ruskin Bond has mapped out and peopled a unique literary landscape. This omnibus edition brings together all his published fiction, remarkable for its charm and quiet wisdom. In addition to over fifty short stories, the selection includes all the longer works by Ruskin Bond: The Room on the Roof and Vagrants in the Valley, two classic novels of adolescence; A Flight of Pigeons, the haunting story of the capture of a young English girl by a Pathan during the revolt of 1857; and Delhi is Not Far, where the narrator, a young bisexual writer, describes his ambivalent relationship with the streetwise Suraj and the prostitute Kamla. Also included is The Sensualist, a novella which created a controversy when it first appeared over twenty years ago and has not been published in book form before. ƒ??(This collection is) a fitting tribute to one of the best of contemporary India.ƒ?? ƒ??The Tribune A well-crafted bunch of short stories, long stories, novellas and novels, this volume brings to life the special flavours of life in the hills and goes on to strengthen the “Rudyardian thesis” that the smell of the Himalayas if it once creeps into the blood of a man he will return to the hills again and again and will love to live and die among them. ƒ??The Tribune (Ruskin Bond) is a writer who has, with intense depth and sensitivity, absorbed the essence of the polyglotic and culturally syncretic contemporary Indian society.