Kim, by Rudyard Kipling (Penguin, £3.99 in UK)

Arguably this is Kipling's masterpiece, the work of fiction in which his deep knowledge of India and his understanding of its…

Arguably this is Kipling's masterpiece, the work of fiction in which his deep knowledge of India and his understanding of its mentality and culture show up best without rhetoric or sentimentality. The passages of quasi-mystical philosophy are sometimes rather hard to take - Kipling was no mystic, nor even a thinker, but he had tremendous narrative and descriptive powers, as well as a genius for creating "atmosphere". In some ways the novel can be read as a picaresque one, and the parallel with Huckleberry Finn has been made more than once. As a committed imperialist, Kipling was sympathetic towards the Raj, but he also knew the other side of the coin and had a gift for depicting low life and the attitudes of society's underdogs.