The Phantom 'Rickshaw, and Other Ghost Stories

About the book

The title story follows an unwanted return whose meaning cannot be separated from a narrator's treatment of another person. My Own True Ghost Story and The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes offer sharply different encounters with apparent haunting and social dislocation. The Man Who Would Be King turns two adventurers' ambition into a venture beyond the authority they know, while The Finest Story in the World considers strange memory and the appetite to turn experience into fiction. This edition contains all five pieces. Kipling varies supernatural suggestion, irony, and adventure, often framing extraordinary events through a storyteller whose knowledge has limits. The collection rewards attention to the claims made by its narrators, particularly when familiarity with a colonial world becomes an unwarranted belief that it is fully understood.

• Uncertain testimony
• Ambition
• Colonial confidence

Why read it

For a varied group of unsettling narratives whose tellers repeatedly encounter the limits of their authority and understanding.

Five-story collection · English text