ISBN: 9780143333432    Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd Year of publishing: 2014     Format:  Paperback No of Pages: 224        Language: English

Rusty is a quiet, imaginative and sensitive boy who lives with his grandparents in pre-Independence Dehra Dun. Though he is not the adventurous himself, the strangest and most extraordinary things keep happening around him. The house in Dehra is full of strange creatures. Rusty has to deal with everything from his grandfather's pet python to the ever-inventive Uncle Ken. Visiting his father in wartime Java, Rusty narrowly escapes enemy bombardment and survives a plane crash in the Arabian Sea. Back in India, he spends his time encountering a ghost in the garden and recreating his grandmother's youthful days from an old photograph. Then, something totally unexpected happens and Rusty is forced to leave Dehra, his future uncertain. This volume of Rusty stories, the first in a series, traces Rusty's development from early childhood to his early teens and is a riveting read for younger and older children alike.
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Born in Kasauli in 1934, Ruskin Bond grew up in Jamnagar, Dehradun, New Delhi and Shimla. His first novel, The Room on the Roof, written when he was seventeen, received the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written over five hundred short stories, essays and novellas (some included in the collections Dust on the Mountains and Classic Ruskin Bond) and more than forty books for children. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India in 1993, the Padma Shri in 1999, and the Delhi government s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi s Bal Sahitya Puraskar for his total contribution to children s literature in 2013 and was honoured with the Padma Bhushan in 2014. He lives in Landour, Mussoorie, with his extended family.
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