Kim
An orphaned Irish boy grows up on the streets of Lahore, is recruited into the Great Game, and travels with a Tibetan lama who is looking for a river. Kipling holds the two plots together with remarkable ease: the spy story and the pilgrimage comment on each other without either one winning.
The book is a love letter to India and also a colonial document, and it is difficult to read without holding both in mind. Kipling's ear for languages and for the texture of streets is extraordinary. The lama is one of his most sympathetic creations, and the ending refuses the triumph the plot seems to promise.
Public-domain status
First published in 1901. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Rudyard Kipling died in 1936, so this work has been free to republish there since 2007.
Read the text free
- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 2226 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- Bleak House — Charles Dickens, 1853
- Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens, 1838
- New Grub Street — George Gissing, 1891
- The Way We Live Now — Anthony Trollope, 1875
- Mumbai — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
Find a print edition on Amazon · As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Disclosure