Kim

By: Rudyard Kipling

Narrated by: Sam Dastor

Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins

Publisher's summary

Exclusively from Audible

Kipling's masterpiece Kim is his final and most famous work and one of the first and greatest espionage stories ever written. It explores the life of Kimball O'Hara, an Irish orphan who spends his childhood as a vagrant in Lahore. When he befriends an aged Tibetan lama his life is transformed as he is requested to accompany him on a mysterious quest to find the legendary River of the Arrow and achieve Enlightenment. The pilgrimage will take them across the vast continent, across rivers, and up the Himalayas.

While Kim wishes to take part in the imperialistic Great Game, learning espionage from the British secret service, he feels spiritually bound to the lama. Kim has a difficult choice to make: his companion or his country?

A rich and colourful depiction of India's exotic landscape and culture in the imperialistic world of the late 19th century, this audiobook celebrates their friendship and explores a young man's quest for identity.

Rudyard Kipling was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist who was the first English language author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Some of his most memorable works include The Jungle Book and Just So Stories.

In 1998 Kim was ranked at Number 78 on the Modern Library's list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2003 it was listed on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's 'best-loved novel'.

Narrator Biography

A Cambridge graduate who trained at RADA under the direction of Sir Laurence Olivier, Sam Dastor has long featured on screen and stage. He is best known for The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004) and for twice portraying Gandhi in both Lord Mountbatten: The Last Viceroy (1986), and Jinnah (1998).Sam Dastor has starred in many West End productions with roles such as Ariel in The Tempest, and Orlando in As You Like It. His most recent work has included starring on stage at the Wolsey Theatre in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2016). He has narrated a large catalogue of audiobooks including V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas.

Public Domain (P)2014 Audible, Inc.

Anthropology as YA novel

Kipling is problematic insofar as his praise of imperialism was then, and is now, ethnocentric. Kim harbors this perspective, but is not guided by it. The book is a superbly picturesque yarn and a mediocre spy novel that is ultimately an engaging anthropological account of the subcontinent. (Kipling’s parents were museum curators). The greatest shortcoming of the novel is that, dispute Kipling’s adult contemporary readers, Kim is YA fiction - characters are either flawless or hapless,most are decoration and all are flat - not to mention the teenage protagonist and the quest plot. And therein is its value, if you want to understand why we find late Victorian era perspectives so loathsome look no further than this evidence of their arrested development. Now here’s the dig: Kim is not a far cry from modern classics like Life of Pi, travelog instagram accounts or a food documentary in some far flung place - religious pluralism, lush setting, and reverence of food are major themes in Kim. Then as now, people saturate themselves with titillating content void of any interrogation of the human condition and ask why things feel so meaningless and bleak.

A really great book

A fantastic book that is a timeless classic of the anthology of the western understanding of rural Indian life. I found it to be very I intriguing and worthwhile to comprehend and have gotten through. I highly recommend this book.

Classic story, monumental narration

Classic story encompassing the multifaceted cultures of England and India told with Kipling’s unique perspective. A difficult story to narrate, due to the various accents, handled magnificently.

Great literature transports the reader

I was transported to time and place of Kim in a way that few books do. I feel that I have seen the plains and mountains of India,walking with Kim and his holy man. Kipling’s sympathetic descriptions of the land and people of the country of his birth shine through.

Best Narrator

Dastor's ability to shift voices is played dexterously. It is really hard to imagine that only one narrator is handling all these voices and intonations. Thank you Sam Dastor, you added a touch of perfection to the story. Highly Recommended.

better than I had anticipated

I had read some of Kipling's short stories and found them a little rambling and a little judgemental. this one was not. the narration is great.

Great performance. Enjoyable story

The way that the narrator performed the multitude of characters and accents was highly impressive.

Transcends Its Racial Context

For many years i was put off reading Kipling because of the taint of racism associated with his writing. Yes, Kim does possess the imperialistic sensibilities of the late Victorian period. Yes, essentialised notions of white blood are present in this book. Yes, the N word is used in this book. But the ethos of Kim-- a story about an abandoned Irish colonial boy raised as a Hindi beggar/street kid-- transcends the historical context of racism. The writing is poetic. The narrative is vivid and one of a kind. The hero does not want to be a white colonist, and it is actually the ignorant characters who tend to be the racists in this novel.

Welcome to India

Incredible reading of a great classic. How wonderful to find Kipling's greatest work read by someone up to the job!

A most excellent listen!

The narrator of this book did a wonderful job in capturing the multitude of voices presented by Rudyard Kipling in this book. It's a glimpse into colonial India that we don't hear any more. Kipling tells the story with sympathy and a command of the language that still impresses. I was touched more than once by his descriptions of Kim's travels about India and the people he meets along the way. Give it a listen, you won't be disappointed.