One of the great adventure books of all time — the story of Kim, a white boy in India, who followed the Grand Trunk Road on a secret mission.

Kim was no ordinary Hindu beggar boy. Burned black as a native by the sun, he nevertheless retained many traces of his seemingly remote white parentage. The half-caste woman who cared for him claimed to be his dead mother's sister, but his real parent was the wonderful walled city of Lahore, and from the Delhi Gate to the Outer Fort Ditch, he was known as "the little friend of all the world." He lived with men whose lives were far stranger than any oriental fairy tale. On the day when Kim attached himself to the old Lama from the north, there grew one of the oddest and yet most perfect relationships that has ever existed. The wanderings of this simple holy man and his precocious disciple make a strange and exciting story.

No book has ever captured the age-old spirit of India and that of perennial youth with more pungent reality than Kipling's immortal KIM.

From the dust jacket of the 1952 Doubleday & Company, Inc. reprint