Moon Mountain

Contents: Introduction. Note on the translator. 1. A letter from Africa. 2. The camp. 3. The station. 4. Finding Alvarez. 5. The lost mine. 6. The Veldt. 7. Across the Richtersveld range. 8. The bed of the fire God. 9. Bunip. 10. The cave. 11. Kalahari. 12. Attileo's Gift. 13. The final stretch. 14. Blue sea. Appendix. Glossary.

"A letter arrives from Africa, and Shankar's life will never be the same again. Share the incredible adventures of this village boy from Bengal, as fate catapults him across the blue sea to the dark continent, where horizon opens upon horizon and peril shadows every step. For Shankar and his explorer-companion Diego Alvarez, all paths of Africa lead--through desert, jungle, veldt and Savannah, past man-eating lions and deadly snakes, beyond fiery volcanoes and into mysterious caverns--finally, inexorably, to moon mountain. It beckons, ever elusive yet tantalisingly within reach, at once insubstantial as a tale and solid as rock, the stuff of their wildest dreams and nightmares, propelling them onwards in an unending quest to push the boundaries of the known.

Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's Moon Mountain is a realm where legend and landscape, journey and destination, strange fiction and stranger truth meet, and wherein the pursuit of the idea is dramatised as a lavish, no-holds-barred adventure that infects you with pure, joyous wanderlust. Above all, it is a classic tale about growing up and coming of age, as much a rite of passage for the young reader as for its irrepressible young protagonist."