Rudyard Kipling’s classic stories are beautifully presented in this highly attractive edition enhanced with eight stunning colour illustrations by Chris Riddell as well as by Kipling’s own illustrations – including his most famous one of The Elephant’s Child. Kipling’s versions of how different animals have come by their characteristic- How the Leopard Got his Spots, How the Whale Got His Throat, The Cat that Walked By Itself and the others remains one of the best books to read aloud to any one from 5 upwards.
Thirteen classic children's stories from the Nobel Prizewinning author of The Jungle Book. Inspired by the bedtime stories Rudyard Kipling told his own daughter, Josephine, the charming tales in Just So Stories, including ';How the Leopard Got His Spots' and ';How the Camel Got His Hump,' attempt to answer the many questions children have about animals. ';Children love these stories as well because of their extraordinary ingenuity and inventiveness. Kipling has an Aesopian understanding of animals, of our dealings with them and our curious interrelatedness, interdependence, how we can learn about our own strange behaviour, our vanities and our foolishness, through them and through our relationship with them.' Michael Morpurgo, The Guardian ';It does for very little children much what the Jungle Books did for older ones. It is artfully artless, in its themes, in its repetitions, in its habitual limitation, and occasional abeyance, of adult humor. It strikes a child as the kind of yarn his father or uncle might have spun if he had just happened to think of it; and it has, like all good fairy-business, a sound core of philosophy.' The Atlantic
Just So Stories was the first book I ever truly loved Michael Morpurgo
Author
About Rudyard Kipling
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.
