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Title: Kim

Author: Rudyard Kipling

Narrator: Madhav Sharma

Format: Unabridged

Length: 13 hrs and 22 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-08-09

Publisher: Naxos AudioBooks

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 154 votes

Genres: Classics, British Literature

Publisher's Summary:

Set in the days of the British Raj, Kipling's finest novel is the exciting and touching tale of an Irish orphan-boy who has lived free in the streets of Lahore before setting out, with a Tibetan Lama, on a spiritual quest. Kim later enrolls in the Indian Service and simultaneously embarks on an espionage mission of supreme importance. A thrilling climax in the Himalayas occurs when the two quests become entangled. Kim's search for identity is staged within one of the most magnificent and affectionate portrayals of Indian culture in literature.

Members Reviews:

Fabulous Narrator

After hearing the sample, I bought this performance of Kim by Madhav Sharma, even though I already had another very fine recording. I immediately listened to it, enthralled, every available minute. Sharma masterfully uses vocal timbre, inflection, pacing, and a whole palette of accents to bring Kipling's characters into vivid focus. He's subtle, not heavy-handed, making character voices all distinct, nuanced, and convincing, so the action and tensions in the story become very clear. I've loved this book since childhood, but it's never seemed as real as Sharma makes it. I'll listen to this repeatedly.

Great story, brilliantly read

This is a wonderful book, overflowing with the author's love for the variety and richness of India.

Much has been made of the richness of Jim Dale's narration of the Harry Potter stories, but he has nothing on the performance of Madhav Sharma. His range of different characterizations, all unique, ranging from the gutter accents of Lahore, England and Ireland, to the most polished, are delivered to perfection.

Sharma's is a performance to be savored.

Never Was Such a Chela!

"What is Kim?" asks the title character of Rudyard Kipling's classic novel (1901) more than once. Kim is a poor orphan boy whose Irish parents have died in India, leaving him basically on his own in the city of Lahore, where he has been doing "nothing with an immense success," other than avoiding British authority figures who would send him to an orphanage or, worse, to a school, as well as engaging in nighttime intrigue by carrying messages between dandies and their mistresses and hanging out with a varied host of uncommon common people, becoming known as Little Friend of all the World. He speaks English brokenly as a second language but is fluent in vernacular Hindi and Urdu, expressing himself in them with a spicy street poetry, and he can pass for an indigenous Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist. So fluidly swims Kim in his environment that not many people know that he's really a sahib (white master) whose full name is Kimball O'Hara.

As the novel opens, Kim is playing King of the Canon when an exotic old lama appears before him, down from his Tibetan monastery and bewildered by the big city. The "gentle and untainted" holy man, who is not proof from, to his shame, becoming "a brawler and a swashbuckler" when pushed off the Middle Way, wants to "free himself from the Wheel of Things," and hence is questing through the plains of India for the legendary river that sprung from the earth at the spot where Buddha shot an arrow, for bathing in the River of the Arrow will cleanse him of all dirt and sin and facilitate transcendence.