LONE FOX DANCING : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (HARDCOVER)
Ruskin Bond 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. 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. 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. 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.