Beastly Tales from Here and There

Since they were first published in 1992, Vikram Seth’s glorious animal fables in verse have delighted young and old alike. Familiar characters in a magical new form—like the tortoise who outran the hare and the monkey who outwitted the greedy crocodile—take their place beside a freshly minted gallery of brilliantly quirky, comical creatures. Of the ten fables told here, two come from India, two from China, two from Greece, two from the Ukraine and two, the author tells us, directly ‘from the land of Gup’.