Three o'clock and all is not well. Sleep has abandoned him again. He sits bolt upright in his bed, panic rising from his stomach like bile. In the past eight months he has crossed oceans and whole continents from Bombay to London, New York, Vancouver, Yokohama, and halfway back and now, dislocated by the darkness and the hour and the jumbled swirl of distances he's come, he does not know where he is". With this beginning, Victoria Vinton transports us to the summer of 1892 when twenty-six-year-old Rudyard Kipling arrives in Vermont with little money, a pregnant wife, and the beginning of "The Jungle Book" bubbling in his mind. Having fled the scrutiny of London's literary high life and hoping to escape the wounds of his troubled past, he sets to work on his new story, eventually introducing his young neighbour, Joe, to Mowgli, Shere Khan and Baloo. And as Kipling's tales take root in Joe's mind, the child is able to free himself from the confines of his dismal life through the powerful and unsettling influence of the imagination.