Filled with lyrical, exotic prose and nostalgia for Rudyard Kipling’s native India, Kim is widely acknowledged as the author’s greatest novel and a key element in his winning the 1907 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is the tale of an orphaned sahib and the burdensome fate that awaits him when he is unwittingly dragged into the Great Game of Imperialism. During his many adventures, he befriends a sage old Tibetan lama who transforms his life. As Pankaj Mishra asserts in his Introduction, “To read the novel now is to notice the melancholy wisdom that accompanies the native boy’s journey through a broad and open road to the narrow duties of the white man’s world: how the deeper Buddhist idea of the illusion of the self, of time and space, makes bearable for him the anguish of abandoning his childhood.”

吉蔔林（Rudyard Kipling，1865-1936）

著名英國作傢、詩人，1907年獲得諾貝爾文學奬，獲奬理由為“他的作品以觀察入微、思想新穎、氣勢雄渾和敘述卓越見長”。其傑齣的敘事與高超的文學性備受後世推崇，對世界文學影響深遠。

齣生於印度，1870年被送迴英國上學，1882年返迴印度，成為一名記者並開始寫作。主要著作有短詩《如果》，詩集《營房謠》《七海》，短篇小說集《山中的平凡故事》《正是如此故事集》《普剋山的帕剋》《叢林之書》，長篇小說《勇敢的船長》《吉姆》，等等。