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.

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.

Terrific

My first experience with Kipling. It took me a few attempts to get into it; but once I got rolling it was magnificent. The story is terrific and the narration is so well done. Kudos to Sam Dastor for such a lively and almost palpable rendering.

Classic Kipling, beautifully performed

Kim is an orphan boy with a foot in two worlds, living during the late 1800s. British by birth but seeing himself as a part of the local community, he lives as a street kid until his employment as an agent of espionage. He is also a student, and a disciple of a Tibetan Buddhist Lama. His adventures take place in Pakistan, India, and the Himalayas. The performance does full justice to the splendour of the language, and covers a remarkable range of accents.

Perfect rendition

A wonderful story I've read over and over again. And a perfect performance, each voice different, adapted to the character.

One of my very favorite listens

What made the experience of listening to Kim the most enjoyable?

I love this Kipling story. The adventure of a spy store, the respect for Indian culture, and the friendship of a young rascal and an old Llama give it a lot of depth. I can listen to it over and over, and appreciate it each time. It's a great bed time story, yet I'm never bored.

What other book might you compare Kim to and why?

You might compare this book to Huckleberry Finn. Both have the same respect for culture, the satire of racial perspective, and the sense of a higher moral framework than that of our immediate parochial perspective.

Have you listened to any of Sam Dastor’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

I don't think so, but he's perfect for Kim.

Kipling, Master story teller

Kipling is a master story teller, relating the education and adventures of a white orphan in India, raised in the streets and recruited as a soldier in the Great Game of British spy-craft in Hindustan.

Kim

A wonderfully fantastic tale made all the more enjoyable by the most excellent narration of Sam Dastor.

Kim is a beautiful book.

it's easy to see why people treat Kim as Kipling's opus.

it is to the multiveried culture of India during the Raj something like what Huckleberry Finn is to America of the same time. it doesn't have a moral it isn't preaching it is simply painting a picture of the people in the time and a way that loves them all. it doesn't declare the rightness of any of the views or the wrongness it simply shows them as they are and loves them for what they are. I find that incredibly refreshing as compared to most contemporary historical works.

This narrator did an excellent job of catching the feel and the tone of each character and so far as this American knows, the accents too.

In much the way that mad Max is not the primary character of The mad Max movies but instead the world is, and Max simply is the vehicle to introduce you to the world so Kim is to India as seen by Kipling. the story doesn't really begin or end so much as just to give you a bunch of vignettes to introduce an interesting world if any world deserved an extended universe it is not marvel it is this. the spycraft of things like John wick are silly in cartoonish. they are fun but the longer you dwell on them and the longer you focus on them the more absurd they feel. whereas the spycraft and Kim while being a little bit fantastic seems to have a lot more room for development. let's hope Amazon never discovers this and makes a horrible miniseries out of it.

Beautiful story!

I absolutely loved the relation between Kim and the Lama. Their special connection and mutual understanding is very well portrayed. It’s also very interesting to see Kim’s development among all the twists and turns, but always remaining loyal to his Lama. It’s also very rich about India details.
The performance is very good with a lot of accents.