Unhurried Tales: My Favourite Novellas + Owls in the Family (Set of 2 Books)

?I had placed one [owl] on a branch of the mango tree and was stooping to pick up the other when I received quite a heavy blow on the back of my head. A second or two later the mother owl swooped down at Grandfather but he was agile enough to duck out of its way.? This is a collection of Ruskin Bond?s ?small town? stories. Meet Ranji?s wonderful bat which is his lucky charm along with wacky parrots ostriches owls and a number of idiosyncratic characters in other stories. Hold your breath as Romi cycles through a raging forest fire and follow the Boy Scouts on delightful adventures. Lose yourself in timeless romantic classics ?The Eyes Have It? and ?Time Stops at Shamli? and savour the bittersweetness of ?The Blue Umbrella?. Owls in the Family will take you on a journey through childhood and youth?through romance and thrill leaving you enchanted with Bond?s beautiful world.+Unhurried Tales: My Favourite Novellas brings together for the very first time Ruskin Bond?s favourite (and finest) novellas. The stories in this book include Time Stops at Shamli (written in 1956 and published for the first time in 1987); The Blue Umbrella which has been a bestseller for the last forty years; Angry River which was a longer work when it was first written; Bus Stop Pipalnagar; Night of the Leopard; The Last Tiger and Tales of Fosterganj his latest novella which was published in 2013. These stories speak of a world that has long vanished but it is a world that has lost none of its power to enchant. Whether we are accompanying Sita on her perilous journey down the angry river or Bisnu as he gets the better of a dangerous leopard whether we delight in Binya?s joy at owning her blue umbrella or are saddened by the fate of the last tiger whether we laugh uproariously at the antics of the eccentric guests at the ?hotel? in Shamli get involved in the adventures of the boys in Pipalnagar or plunge into the various goings-on in the ?backwater? of Fosterganj we are always entertained always charmed. All the stories unwind in an unhurried way even those that are filled with death-defying thrills and spills and it is this quality that enables us to sink into them and experience to its fullest the magic of the fiction that Ruskin Bond has spun out of the hills and small towns of India for over sixty years.