Tales from the Indian Subcontinent, Book Two

Some stories were never meant to be read quietly.

Some stories are kept alive by books. These were kept alive by grandparents.

Tales to read aloud together - fourteen of them, retold for the voice rather than the eye.

An ant whispers in an elephant's ear on behalf of a sparrow. A weaver marries a princess through a jackal's outrageous lies, and it is the princess who saves them both. A whole town talks itself into believing there is a goblin in the hills.

Two chapters hold tales the author heard in childhood, retold just the way they were first heard; the rest come from the Hitopadesha and the great story-books of Bengal and the Punjab.

They were spoken long before anyone wrote them down. So this book puts them back in the mouth. There are refrains your child will be chanting back at you before the second telling is over. Short lines stand on their own where you are meant to slow down and let the room go quiet.

The world inside them is an earthy one. Woodsmoke in a mountain valley. Rice drying on a wide mat. A jackal calling at dusk. Animals who are hungry and vain and clever and sometimes very foolish, moving through the country the first tellers were standing in.

Nothing is dumbed down. Nothing is hurried. A chapter takes about ten minutes aloud, which is roughly the length of a bedtime.

What you get, and what you can trust

• Seven chapters, fourteen tales - two stories a night, or one if the day was long.
• Every tale from a collection now in the public domain, credited by name.
• Every change in the retelling written down at the back - including where the old version was harsher than a child needs.
• Two wondering questions after every tale, so the story keeps going after the book shuts.

For children of all ages who love a good story - for teens who want to meet these tales again, for grown-ups who never stopped loving the old stories, and for the one doing the reading, who is allowed to enjoy it too.

The years when a child will still climb up beside you and ask for one more are not very many. This is a book for spending them on.

Volume Six of Fables & Stories of the World - seven volumes. The set circles the globe: Aesop and the classical world; the Indian subcontinent in two books; Africa; Europe and the Silk Road; East and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific and the Americas. Same voice, same promise, a different part of the world each time.