Book of the Week: Kim by Rudyard Kipling

Nobel Prize-winning author Rudyard Kipling set his final and most famous novel in the complex, mystery-shrouded India of the mid-19th century where an exotic landscape teems with natives living under British colonial rule.

Kimball O’Hara, the poor orphaned son of an Irish soldier stationed in Lahore, straddles both worlds. Neither wholly British nor completely Indian, the young boy searches for his identity in the country where he was born; but at the same time, he struggles to create an identity for himself. Cunning and street wise, Kim is mature beyond his thirteen years and learns to move chameleon-like between the two cultures, becoming the disciple of a Tibetan monk while training as a spy for the British secret service.

Far above the average adventure story, Kim will captivate Kipling devotees as well as fans of tales brimming with foreign intrigue and treachery. Charged with action and suspense, yet profoundly spiritual, Kim vividly expresses the sounds and smells, colors and characters, opulence and squalor of complex, contradictory India under British rule.