[sufue]

The Quest for Kim documents the attempts, some successful, and some not, by author Peter Hopkirk, who has written a lot about India/central Asia and the Great Game period, to trace actual places and people in Kipling's Kim. I've read several books by Hopkirk and enjoyed them all, including this one, which has dropped to $1.99 at Kindle and Kobo US.

However, with the novel as its focus, Quest is a little different than Hopkirk's more traditional books, which are histories. I myself had read Kim a long time ago, then read Quest, and then got inspired to re-read Kim, and enjoyed it in a different way with some of the background I now had.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/Quest-Kim-Pet...dp/B00GW4L0HK/
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/quest-for-kim-1

Spoiler:

This book is for all those who love Kim, that masterpiece of Indian life in which Kipling immortalized the Great Game. Fascinated since childhood by this strange tale of an orphan boy's recruitment into the Indian secret service, Peter Hopkirk here retraces Kim's footsteps across Kipling's India to see how much of it remains.

To attempt this with a fictional hero would normally be pointless. But Kim is different. For much of this Great Game classic was inspired by actual people and places, thus blurring the line between the real and the imaginary. Less a travel book than a literary detective story, this is the intriguing story of Peter Hopkirk's quest for Kim and a host of other shadowy figures.