The Penguin Book of Indian Railway Stories

The stories in this collection capture the essence of the Indian Railway from the small-town station, at the time of the Raj, to the present day big-city station bursting at the seams.

The teeming an varied life of the Indian railway station and its environs have fascinated writers from Jules Verne in the 1870s to more recently Satyajit Ray, R.K. Laxman and more modern writers. In this anthology, one of India’s best-known writers makes a selection of the greatest railway stories the subcontinent has produced.

Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, in 1934, and grew up in Jamnagar (Gujarat), Dehradum and Shimla. In the course of a writing career spanning thirty-five years, he has written over a hundred short stories, essays, novels and more than thirty books for children. Three collections of the short stories, The Night Train at Deoli Time Stops at Shamli and our Trees still grow in Dehra have been published by Penguin India. He has also edited an anthology, the Penguin book of Indian Ghost Stories.

The room on the roof was his first novel, when he was seventeen, and it received the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Vagrants in the Valley was also written in his teens and picks up from where the room on the Roof leaves off. These two novellas were published in one volume by Penguin India in 1993 as was a much acclaimed collection of his non-fiction writing, Rain in the mountains.

Ruskin Bond received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India for 1992, for Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra.