When Ramsay Wood retells a story he makes a proper job of it: not for him those pale imitations of a nobel original which is what your average reteller palms off on his readers.

A beautiful book full of mirth and human interest and unsentimental wisdom and vigorous writing.

“A fluent but misguided and misleading adaptation of one of the world’s great narrative classics . . . Ramsay Wood has conflated . . . all the the major variants of the Panchatantra, reducing them to a quirky, distracting fragment which is likely to irritate the scholar and confuse the laymen . . . An…

Ramsay Wood follows his originals closely, and slips with skill in and out of stories as closely interfolded as the petals of a rose.

Sans frontière linguistique ni culturelle, ces fables ignorent aussi celles du temps. Au sein du recueil, les paradoxes temporels abondent. Des lettres très antiques, enfermées dans une série de coffres par le roi Houschenk autrefois, s’adressent aux souverains de l’avenir. Elles renferment des conseils dont le sens ne s’éclaire qu’à mesure, parfois avec un très…