SynopsisOver 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 natural world and everyday life. 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 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 intimacy and candour, Bond recalls his boarding school years in Shimla and winter holidays in Dehradun, when he tried to come to terms with a sense of abandonment, made and lost friends, discovered great books, and found his true calling. Determined to be a writer, he spent four difficult years in England, and he writes poignantly of his loneliness and heartbreak 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 India—the home he would return to even before the novel was published, taking a gamble that proved 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 with a magnificent sense of time and place—and containing over fifty photographs—Lone Fox Dancing is a book of quiet and enduring magic, like Ruskin Bond himself.
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Binding: HardBack
About the author
Ruskin Bond is an Indian author of British descent. He is considered to be an icon among Indian writers and children's authors and a top novelist.
He wrote his first novel, The Room on the Roof, when he was seventeen which won John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written several novellas, over 500 short stories, as well as various essays and poems, all of which have established him as one of the best-loved and most admired chroniclers of contemporary India.
In 1992 he received the Sahitya Akademi award for English writing, for his short stories collection, "Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra", by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters in India. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 for contributions to children's literature.
He now lives with his adopted family in Landour near Mussoorie.