V. S. Naipaul

In a narrative that moves with dreamlike swiftness from India to England to Africa, Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul has produced his finest novel to date, a bleakly resonant study of the fraudulent bargains that make up an identity.

The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the

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Born the "wrong way" and thrust into a world that greeted him with little more than a bad omen, Mr. Mohun Biswas has spent his forty-six years of life striving for independence. But his determined efforts have met only with calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning of his father, for which he is inadvertently responsible, Mr. Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. When he marries into the domineering Tulsi family on...

"In the beginning it is just a car trip through Africa. Two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys, and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves...

Born in Trinidad of Indian descent, a resident of England for his entire adult life, and a prodigious traveler, V. S. Naipaul has always faced the challenges of “fitting one civilization to another.” Here, he takes us into his sometimes inadvertent process of creative and intellectual assimilation, which has shaped both his writing and his life. In a probing narrative that is part meditation and part remembrance, Naiapul discusses the writers...

The story of a writer's singular journey from Trinidad to England and from one state of mind to another.