Kim

Kim is a picaresque novel by Rudyard Kipling, first serialised in McClure's Magazine from December 1900 to October 1901 and published as a book by Macmillan in October 1901. It is set in British India and follows an orphaned boy who is equally at home in the bazaars and among the intelligence officers of the Raj.

Kim meets a Tibetan lama searching for a river of healing and becomes his disciple and companion on the road. He is also drawn, almost by accident, into the Great Game, the intelligence contest between Britain and Russia in central Asia, and is educated by the men who run it. The novel follows the journey he makes with the lama and the training he receives in the same years, and it ends with both of them still looking.

Kipling wrote from his own experience of India, and the book's reputation rests as much on its portrait of the country's roads, languages and communities as on its plot. It is usually read alongside his Indian short stories.