Just So & Other Stories

Little treasures, the FLAME TREE COLLECTABLE CLASSICS are chosen to create a delightful and timeless home library. Each stunning, gift edition features deluxe cover treatments, ribbon markers, luxury endpapers and gilded edges. The unabridged text is accompanied by a Glossary of Victorian and Literary terms produced for the modern reader.

Among Rudyard Kipling’s best known works, Just So Stories is a collection of stories for children that began as bedtime stories that Kipling told to his daughter. Each one is an imaginative and joyful explanation of an origin – for example, one story is ‘How the Camel Got His Hump’ and another is ‘How the Leopard Got His Spots’. There are also stories explaining how the alphabet came to be, why the tides ebb and flow and how man domesticated wild animals. It was published to high praise and has since become a children’s classic, loved by many.

Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, novelist and short-story writer born in 1865 in India. The country provided inspiration for his works, in particular for Kim (1901) and Plain Tales from the Hills (1888). His legacy is vast, with novels such as The Jungle Book (1894), short stories including ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ and a multitude of poems such as ‘If—’ (1910) and ‘Mandalay’ (1890) among his most well-known works. He was a great innovator in children’s stories and in the art of short story writing and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of his extraordinary writing abilities.

Judith John (glossary) is a writer and editor specializing in literature and history. She has worked as an editor on major educational projects, including English A: Literature for the Pearson International Baccalaureate series. Judith’s major research interests include Romantic and Gothic literature, and Renaissance drama.