Product Description

Kipling's epic rendition of the imperial experience in India is also his greatest long work. Two men - Kim, a boy growing into early manhood and the lama, an old ascetic priest - are fired by a quest. Kim is white, a sahib, although born in India. While he wants to play the Great Game of Imperialism, he is also spiritually bound to the lama and he tries to reconcile these opposing strands, while the lama searches for redemption from the Wheel of Life. A celebration of their friendship in an often hostile environment, Kim captures the opulence of India's exotic landscape, overlaid by the uneasy presence of the British Raj.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11501 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

About the Author
Born in Bombay, India, but raised in England from the age of five, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) is today best known as the author of such classics of literature as The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1902) and Just So Stories (1902). He returned to India in 1882 to become a journalist and local newspaper editor and began writing supernatural stories set in his native continent. Kipling was the first British writer to be award the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1907.

Customer Reviews

Splendid Classic - adventure, spy, intrigue and loyalty
KIM is a superb classic of spying, daring-do, intrigue, bizzare situations, a lost inheritance and one of the best descriptions of life in India under the Raj. I reread KIM at least once a year for the sheer joy of joining Kim O'Hara in finding his red Bull on the Green field, enjoying the wealth of different folks and playing the Great Game. There're the devious character, trader Abu Babi, the gentle Lama, and Kim's lessons in how to spy properly as well as the Widow, the English Colonel and the myriad of other well-drawn characters. Kipling remains one of the masters of story-telling. The yarn is far from 'old stuff' since Russian spying on Afghanistan has had a long history - "the pedigree of the white stallion" starts the action. (Of course, when the Russians invaded Afghantistan in this decade, I instantly reread KIM and chortled at their failure.)

KIM is also a tale of honor, loyalty and devotion as well as Kim's amusing antics for self-survival. The characters are exceedingly well developed, as only Kipling, with his appreciation of East and West, could weave for our enjoyment.

Anyone who aspires to be a writer should put Kipling high on their list of reading.

... After six decades I can still find delight in KIM and relive the thrill of setting out on a long and dangerous road, thwarting spies and saving two nations!

In Search of Kim ...
As the great-grandson of an Irish Colour Sergeant who married a local girl in Srinagar, Kashmir in the second half of the 19th century, a grandson of a REME Sergeant who was stationed in Quetta (amongst many other such places over two decades) and fought on the NW Frontier, and son of a mother born in an Army garrison and who spent her first fifteen years in the exotic places portrayed in Kipling's "Kim", I was raised on a diet of spine-tingling family tales of the Raj.
When I finally read "Kim" at the age of ten, I often imagined he was a close relation - in the way, I am sure, that many other boys born into such army families might have imagined.
Without doubt Kipling captured an India of the late 19th century. The imagery of his story has never left me. This is a tale told in a dusty bazaar by a lyrical storyteller, one which holds the listener spellbound to the very end. Kipling did in this novel what new (and not so new) scribes should perhaps aspire to. He told a story. Simply and well. These are, and always will be, the finest and most loved tales.

Kipling's best book by far
This is Kipling's love letter to India. Kim is an Anglo-Indian boy drawn into the "Great Game", Great Britain's Secret Service battle with Russia in Asia. Kipling's colonialist attitude to India and the Indians may be unpalatable to many modern readers, but his great love of the diversity, the colour and the spirituality of India shine through. Read with an open mind, it's easy to enjoy the story and lose yourself in the magic of Kipling's evocation of a lost time and place.