Mr Oliver’s Diary (Paperback)  | Released: Oct,2016

A gun-toting, violin-playing headmasterA homicidal barberA hungry leopard and about a hundred frogs on the looseBoys with a talent for pranks and jokesMr Oliver, a history teacher, arrives in Simla with a trainload of hungry boys to start a new term at the prep school. As he records the antics of the amazing characters there, and all that they get up to, we quickly realize that there is never a dull moment. A fire, a missing Headmaster and runaway students make sure that not a day goes by when Mr Oliver has nothing to report in his diary. He writes about the eccentric teachers, the girls’ school next door and the lovely Anjali Ramola, whom he secretly admires. Laugh-out-loud funny, with a core of old-world charm that is trademark Bond, Mr Oliver’s Diary has stories and characters that have never appeared anywhere before. With his runaway wig, pet shrew and endearing dry wit, Mr Oliver is sure to become as well-loved as those other vintage Ruskin Bond characters, Uncle Ken and Rusty. About the AuthorBorn in Kasauli in 1934, Ruskin Bond grew up in Jamnagar, Dehradun, New Delhi and Shimla. His first novel, The Room on the Roof, written when he was seventeen, received the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written over five hundred short stories, essays and novellas (some included in the collections Dust on the Mountains and Classic Ruskin Bond) and more than forty books for children. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India in 1993, the Padma Shri in 1999, and the Delhi government’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi’s Bal Sahitya Puraskar for his ‘total contribution to children’s literature’ in 2013 and was honoured with the Padma Bhushan in 2014. He lives in Landour, Mussoorie, with his extended family. He has regaled generations of readers for decades.