Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936) was born in Bombay, and completed his studies abroad before returning to India, where he wrote his celebrated work Plain Tales from the Hills. A novelist, poet and short-story writer, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, becoming the youngest person to have ever received this award. He also received the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Literature in 1926.
An action-packed adventure story and also an endearing coming-of-age tale, Kim is a classic that has captivated readers for over a century. Set in the teeming streets of colonial India, Kipling’s novel tells the story of Kimball O’Hara, a young Irish orphan who leads a vagabond existence, growing up in the walled city of Lahore. He befriends an old Tibetan lama searching for the mythical River of the Arrow, and with him, sets out on an incredible journey along the Grand Trunk Road. En route, Kim is embroiled in a series of adventures that have him thieving, begging and trying his hand at disguises with an eccentric bunch of characters the enigmatic Sahiba of Saharanpur; the mysterious Bengali babu, Hurree Chunder Mookherjee, and the Pashtun horse-trader, Mahbub Ali and is recruited by the British Secret Service to train as a young spy in the Great Game of espionage between Russia and Britain.
