A nice surprise, after having been left somewhat disappointed by Kipling’s short stories: a surprisingly enjoyable, wayward and complex novel this. Not really anti-imperialist, but still a kind of paean to the India Kipling grew up in. At the same time this tale of an English orphan passing for an Indian street urchin, living by his wits and finding surrogate fathers in, amongst other people, a Tibetan lama, a Pathan spy and an English spy handler seems to express a yearning for meaning and connection that reflects some of his own trauma on being left in England by his parents as a young child (as described in his short story ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’).

Excellent introduciton by Alan Sandison in this Oxford edition. Buyers of the e-book should beware that the OCR rendition of the text is less than perfect (some zeros and ones where there should be o'and l's, left out spaces, &C), although still on a par with the free versions around. And unfortunately something has gone wrong with the cross-referencing of the copious footnotes in the text, making them pretty well useless on an e-reader. The publisher ought really to have let someone look at this and remedy the problem.