Rumer Godden's artistry has proved and re-proved itself as one of the most luminously subtle in modern English fiction. As Virgilia Peterson observed in the New York Herald Tribune, "This novelist who never raises her voice above the muted note of understatement speaks yet so surely and so piercingly of pain and beauty that her words drown the shrill outcry and drum beating of most contemporary fiction . . . ." That quality is again signally evidenced in this first collection of Miss Godden's shorter writings about India.

In her stories, both nature and human nature are dramatized with a haunting evocativeness. Whether she writes of the effect on a young fisherman of the five-months' agony of a Kashmiri winter ("The Wild Duck"), or of the bond between a boy and a ram ("The Little Black Ram"), or of a homesick Indian student in Paris ("The Oyster"), Miss Godden catches the spirit that lies behind the appearance of things. She can also distill the essence of a whole way of life in a few strikingly etched episodes, as in the deeply moving story "Possession." In a very different vein is "Mooltiki," a reminiscence of a jungle sojourn involving two climactic tiger-kills and Mooltiki, an elephant of the most unpredictable and beguiling habits. The poems, of which a dozen examples are included, play happy and appropriate variations on the themes of the stories. Variety marks this collection, but the underlying constant is Rumer Godden's unerring instinct as an artist and a craftsman.

From the dust jacket of The Viking Press edition