One of India's finest and most prolific writers, Ruskin Bond has been putting pen to paper for well over six decades. Since The Room on the Roof - his award-winning debut novel, which introduced readers to the unforgettable Rusty, the orphan from Dehradun - Bond has created characters both charming and eccentric, which have endured in the popular imagination.

School Days is a collection of stories that captures the splendour of our school days. Here Ruskin Bond has weaved together some of the most adventurous and engaging school stories written by master storytellers like Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Samuel Smiles, Anton Chekhov, Richmal Crompton and others.

Ruskin Bond's writing brings the world to us in profound and remarkable ways. His signature style is simplicity itself, but the themes he tackles are big, deep and universal - love, loss, happiness, grief, and all the shades of emotion in between. These are stories of city and small town, mountain and lowland, and of life lived slowly and lightly. For over 50 years, these tales have charmed and beguiled several generations of readers.

For more than four decades now, by way of innumerable short stories, essays, poems, and novels, Ruskin Bond has championed simplicity and quietude in life and in art. This collection of essays and episodes from his journals is, in his own words, "a celebration of my survival as a freelance".  

For over 60 years, since his award-winning debut, The Room on the Roof, was published, Ruskin Bond has charmed and entertained us with characters ranging from the animal world to humans to ghostly spirits, and his magic touch has often presented to us a world unhurried, tucked away in hills and valleys. What does it mean to be an octogenarian loved by the young and old alike? To be synonymous with the smell of pinewood and rambling mountain paths? In short, what is it that makes him Bond?