Fiction · 1901
Kim
Kimball O’Hara, an Irish orphan grown up in the bazaars of Lahore, attaches himself to a Tibetan lama searching for a sacred river and is drawn, at the same time, into the British secret service and its “Great Game” against Russia on the frontier. Rudyard Kipling’s novel, published in 1901, is his fullest picture of the India he knew, and the book of his that is most often called a masterpiece.
Its two plots — the lama’s search for his River of the Arrow, and the Secret Service’s use of a boy who can pass as anyone on the Grand Trunk Road — run side by side without either cancelling the other. It is the least imperial of Kipling’s books about empire: the affection in it is for the country and for the people on the road, not for the administration that runs them.
Contents
New editions
Never lose your place.
This book is free to read in full, and stays that way. Leave an address: one click confirms it and opens a free account, so your progress and bookmarks sync across every device. You'll also hear when the next restored edition enters the archive. Terminate at any time.
Subjects
About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Part of Adventure.
Source mind
About the author
1865–1936 · Modern
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was born in Bombay, sent to England at five, and returned to India at sixteen to work as a journalist in Lahore and Allahabad, where the stories collected in Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) were written. Back in England from 1889, and for some years in Vermont, he wrote The Jungle Book (1894), Captains Courageous, Kim (1901), the Just So Stories and a great deal of verse. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, the first English-language writer to receive it.
Adjacent records
