He sets his eyes upon the people, the beautiful places and the spectacular wildlife. He captures the adventure and joy filled in the way of life in the hills vividly. This collection of fiction and non-fiction works is a must-read for ardent Ruskin Bond fans.

    While his mother runs with Hell's Angel's bikers, T-Bird falls beneath the men's fists and favors, finds solace and hope in the slightest of rewards, and seeks to survive. Soon, his ex-con father returns to town, and what follows is a raw, powerful, poetic story of one boy's passage into adulthood.

    But when he walks through the door of his apartment, he is transformed into the impassioned lover of Blanca, the beautiful, inscrutable wife he saved from the brink of personal crisis. For the love of Blanca, Mario eats sushi and carpaccio, nods in feigned understanding at experimental films, sits patiently through long conversations with her avant-garde friends, and conceals his disgust at shocking art exhibits.Then, little by little, a strange and ominous threat begins to weigh on the marriage.How can love survive its own disappearance? The desperate answer that Antonio Mu�oz Molina proposes in this short, circular novella is a model of literary strategy and style, a splendid homage to Flaubert.

    She spent the next decade quietly taking stock of her life, her immediate surroundings, and, finally, what it means to call a place a home. The result is When Wanderers Cease to Roam. Filled with watercolors of beautiful local landscapes, seasonal activities, and small, overlooked pleasures of easy living, each chapter chronicles the perks of remaining at home, including recipes, hobbies, and prized possessions of the small town lifestyle. At once gorgeously rendered and wholly original, this delightful and masterfully observed year of staying put conjures everything from youthful yearnings and romantic travels to lumpy, homemade sweaters and the gradations of March mud.

    But six weeks later, a second examination revealed there was no cancer -- he had won "a reprieve from death." Faced with a repressive cultural environment and the threat of a spell in a prison farm, Gao fled Beijing and began a journey of 15,000 kilometers into the remote mountains and ancient forests of Sichuan in southwest China. The result of this epic voyage of discovery is Soul Mountain.Bold, lyrical, and prodigious, Soul Mountain probes the human soul with an uncommon directness and candor and delights in the freedom of the imagination to expand the notion of the individual self.

    S. Eliot Prize.I never learned the old top ropes,I was always in steam. Less capstan, less climbing,more re-stowing cargo. Which could be hard and slowas farming- but to sayWhy this is Valparaiso!Or: I'm in Singapore and know my way abouttakes a long time to get stale.-from Book I, "The Middle Sea"When German-Australian sailor Friedrich "Fredy" Boettcher is shanghaied aboard a German Navy battleship at the outbreak of World War I, the sight of frenzied mobs burning Armenian women to death in Turkey causes him, through moral shock, to lose his sense of touch. This mysterious disability, which he knows he must hide, is both protection and curse, as he orbits the high horror and low humor of a catastrophic age.Told in a blue-collar English that regains freshness by eschewing the mind-set of literary language, Fredy's picaresque life-as, perhaps, the only Nordic Superman ever-is deep-dyed in layers of irony and attains a mind-inverting resolution.

    His quest for release brings him to the court of the King of Spain and a battle with an ancient adversary, the pirate Mad Dog Morgan. Can he find redemption?

    It also provides an absorbing account of how the dictionary was written, the personalities of the people working on it & the endless difficulties which nearly led to the whole enterprise being abandoned.

    Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there’s no going back.Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the USA carrying a pair of secret messages – one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld.

    Enchanted by the land, they established a vast ranch on the Laikipia plateau in Kenya. But Africa's splendor came with a price. Filled with pain and joy, beauty and drama, Gallman's haunting memoir "captures perfectly the magic of Kenya" (The New York TImes Book Review).

    Making Mischief pays tribute to the visionary author and illustrator, his profound understanding of children, and his stunningly imaginative and groundbreaking work that carried the picture book so much higher and farther than it had ever flown. A beautifully designed, endlessly fascinating volume, Making Mischief is one master mythmaker’s heartfelt appreciation of another.

    Returning to the rural landscape of her youth, Melanie befriends the flamboyant Mildred Steck, a woman who leads an insurrectionist movement and creates an underground railroad for mothers and children whom the courts and child custody laws have failed to protect from domestic violence. "Crows Over a Wheatfield" is a triumphant fusion of the personal and political -- a controversial, suspenseful story written with rare beauty and insight.

    Christopher Newman, a 'self-made' American millionaire in France, falls in love with the beautiful aristocratic Claire de Bellegarde. Her family, however, taken aback by his brash American manner, rejects his proposal of marriage. When Newman discovers a guilty secret in the Bellegardes' past, he confronts a moral dilemma: Should he expose them and thus gain his revenge? James's masterly early work is at once a social comedy, a melodramatic romance and a realistic novel of manners.

    For Conan knows what he wants - and what he must do to get The Treasure of Tranicos.One of the greatest Conan stories Howard ever wrote will come alive before oyur very eyes in page after page of fabulous illustrations by the master fantasy artist Esteban Maroto. Here are Conan and his world as Howard envisaged them: all the High Adventure, the magic, the daring and excitement of the original Conan in an all-new profusely illustrated edition!

    The narrator, unable to stop himself, tries to track Ruiz-Tagle down, and sees signs of his activity over and over again. A corrosive, mocking humor sparkles within Bolaño's darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bolaño's world there's a big graveyard and there's a big graveyard laugh. (He once described his novel By Night in Chile as "a tale of terror, a situation comedy, and a combination pastoral-gothic novel.")Many Chilean authors have written about the "bloody events of the early Pinochet years, the abductions and murders," Richard Eder commented in the The New York Times: "None has done it in such a dark and glittering fashion as Roberto Bolaño."