Kim

I VERY much doubt I would have ever seriously considered buying Rudyard Kipling's Kim, were it not for seeing it at the knockdown price of £3 on the bookshelves of a charity shop.

A Wordsworth Classics edition from 2009

The tale, originally serialised in 1900-1, is set in Victorian India against the background of the Great Game between the British and Russian empires.

Kipling is credited with popularising Great Game as a way of describing what was seen, in London, as Russian encroachment on Britain's interests.

The tale is full of life, and full of India and its many religions, castes and ways of living.

It is described on the back cover as "Kipling's finest work," but "now controversial."

I have no idea about the former - it is the only work of Kipling's I have read - but I am baffled about the latter.

At any rate, I was enthralled and gripped by Kim, and regard it, despite being fiction, as a very worthy addition to my collection of historical works.