You know how his story ends: the ocean leapt in a single bound, Lanka burning by the light of his own tail, a mountain carried through the night sky.

This book is about how it began.

Before the leap there was a curse, and a promise hidden inside it. A dancer fell from heaven. A mother prayed a son out of the sky. A child mistook the rising sun for a ripe fruit and reached for it, and the gods, in their terror and their love, made him the strongest being in creation, then hid his strength from him.

Son of the Wind is not a scripture, and it quotes no verse. Gathered from the Valmiki Ramayana, the Puranas, and the poets and tellers of every land that loves him, and woven into one continuous tale, it is the story of Hanuman's making, told the way the old storytellers told it: by lamplight, from the very beginning. Where the tellings differ, it shows you. Where they fall silent, it says so. Nothing has been invented.

Book One follows Hanuman from the lap of Anjana to the feet of Lord Rama, with 28 full-page colour paintings and an appendix of the tellings kept by the Jain, Thai, Malay and Buddhist traditions.

Book Two will carry him across the ocean.