Lone Fox Dancing

"In this brilliantly readable autobiography, Ruskin Bond, 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. 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. Full of anecdote, warmth and gentle wit; often deeply moving and always with a magnificent sense of time and place, Lone Fox Dancing is a book of understated, enduring magic, like Ruskin Bond himself."--