The new live-action version of The Jungle Book should send lots of children to read Kipling’s stories of Mowgli, Baloo and Bagheera – let’s hope so anyway because, to quote Rosemary Sutcliffe, ‘The child who has never run with Mowgli’s wolf pack … has missed something that he will not get from any other writer.’ For invention and sheer excitement, the Mowgli stories are very hard to beat. The Second Jungle Book contains stories including The King’s Ankuss, in which Mowgli encounters a terrifying White Cobra guarding precious treasure under a ruined city, and Red Dog, possibly the most exciting of all Mowgli stories, which pits him against the red hunting dogs, feared by every other animal. Real classics, Kipling’s stories will live in readers’ memories and add colour to childhood. ~ Andrea Reece
The Second Jungle Book is a sequel to The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. First published in 1895, it features five stories about Mowgli and three unrelated stories, all but one set in India, most of which Kipling wrote while living in Vermont.
Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves learns more of life and survival in the Indian jungle in the company of well-loved characters such as Baloo the brown bear and Bagheer the black panther.
Including three further stories of life in India, this rich collection of adventure, fable and poetry from the master-storyteller and illustrated by his father, John Lockwood Kipling, is a classic to treasure.
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865. He was educated in England but returned to India as an adult and worked as a journalist. There, he produced stories, sketches and poems that made him a literary celebrity when he returned to England in 1888. After their marriage, Kipling and his wife moved to Vermont, where he wrote The Jungle Book. Published in 1894, it became a children's classic all over the world. Tales of every kind, including historical and science fiction, continued to flow from his pen, including Kim (1901) and the Just So Stories (1902). From 1902 Kipling made his home in Sussex, but continued to travel widely and caught his first glimpse of warfare in South Africa, where he reported in the Boer War. Kipling was the recipient of many honorary degrees and other awards. He was the first writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1907, and in 1926 he received the Gold Medal of the royal Society of Literature. Kipling died in 1936.
