1. Ruskin Bond is India’s most admired and popular living writer. His ghost stories—like his innumerable other stories for young and old—have cast their spell on three generations of readers. 2. Bithia Mary Croker lived in India and Burma from the 1870s to the 1890s with her British Army officer husband. She wrote over forty novels and short story collections that earned her fame in India and England. 3. Rudyard Kipling, one of the finest writers of the 20th century—and author of the Jungle Book and Kim—won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907. 4. Alice Perrin wrote—from personal experience—several novels and stories about life during the British Raj in the 19th century. Some critics regard her, and her contemporary, Bithia Croker, as finer, more sensitive writers than Kipling. 5. Lafcadio Hearn, also known by the Japanese name Koizumi, was a writer and journalist of Greek descent who settled in Japan in 1890. He is best known for his collections of Japanese legends and ghost stories.
<p>Some of the most hypnotically spooky and unsettling ghost stories ever written have been set in the forests, dak bungalows and hill stations of India and the brooding wilderness of pre-modern Japan. And among the masters of this genre are legendary writers like Rudyard Kipling and Ruskin Bond, and three brilliant storytellers who should be better known: Bithia Mary Croker and Alice Perrin—mistresses of the ‘Raj supernatural’—and Lafcadio Hearn, who took Japanese culture to the West. This box set brings together four collections of their best ghost stories.</p><p>A dead woman who comes calling for her husband; a schoolboy who sees two ghosts—or perhaps the same ghost twice—in a pine forest; an ayah who sings to an invisible baby; a mandarin duck that pursues a hunter; a haunted horse; a phantom rickshaw; a banjo-playing spirit. These and other apparitions float through the gripping, atmospheric tales in this ghostly box set.</p>
