Plain Tales from the Hills

Kipling was twenty-two when he published these stories, and the precocious authority of his voice remains staggering. Plain Tales from the Hills captures British India with an insider's sharp eye and an outsider's uneasy conscience, the hill stations where empire is forgetting itself, the barracks where soldiers speak in a slang that crackles off the page. Here first appear Mrs. Hauksbee, the formidable Simla socialite, the policeman Strickland, and the immortal Soldiers Three. The collection exposes the fault lines of colonial life: an Englishman's casual betrayal of a hill girl who loved him, the comedy and tragedy of British officials adrift in their own pretensions. These are deceptively simple sketches, hence the title's pun on plain and hills, but they contain an entire world. Kipling's prose moves with the efficiency of a journalist who learned to make every sentence count. This is where modern short fiction began, and where a young writer announced himself as a voice impossible to ignore.