V.S. Naipaul

From the Nobel Prize-winning author: an unforgettable comedy of manners inspired by the author's father that has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels. "A marvelous prose epic that matches the best nineteenth-century novels for richness of comic insight and final, tragic power." --Newsweek In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has been fighting against destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only to face a lifetime of calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning death of his father, for which he is inadvertently responsible, Mr. Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. But when he marries into the domineering Tulsi family on whom he indignantly becomes dependent, Mr. Biswas embarks on an arduous--and endless--struggle to weaken their hold over him and purchase a house of his own. A heartrending, dark yet comedic novel, A House for Mr. Biswas masterfully evokes a man's quest for autonomy against an emblematic post-colonial canvas.

The Nobel Prize-winning author offers an insightful follow-up to his landmark travelogue Among the Believers a "brilliant ... powerfully observed, stylistically elegant exploration" (The New York Times) that's the result of a five-month journey through Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia, countries where dreams of Islamic purity clash with economic and political realities. Fourteen years after the publication of his landmark travel narrative Among the Believers, V. S. Naipaul returned to the four non-Arab Islamic countries he reported on so vividly at the time of Ayatollah Khomeini's triumph in Iran. Beyond Belief is the result of his five-month journey in 1995 through lands where descendants of Muslim converts live at odds with indigenous traditions. In extended conversations with a vast number of people--a rare survivor of the martyr brigades of the Iran-Iraq war, a young intellectual training as a Marxist guerilla in Baluchistan, an impoverished elderly couple in Teheran whose dusty Baccarat chandeliers preserve the memory of vanished wealth, and countless others--V. S. Naipaul deliberately effaces himself to let the voices of his subjects come through. Yet the result is a collection of stories that has the author's unmistakable stamp. With its incisive observation and brilliant cultural analysis, Beyond Belief is a startling and revelatory addition to the Naipaul canon.

The Nobel Prize-winning author--and "one of literature's great travelers" (Los Angeles Times)--spans continents and centuries to create what is at once an autobiography and a fictional archaeology of colonialism. "Dickensian ... a brilliant new prism through which to view (Naipaul's) life and work."--The New York Times "Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever: we go back all of us to the very beginning: in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings."So observes the opening narrator of A Way in the World, and it is this conundrum--that the bulk of our inheritance must remain beyond our grasp--which suffuses this extraordinary work of fiction. Returning to the autobiographical mode he so brilliantly explored in The Enigma of Arrival, and writing here in the classic form of linked narrations, Naipaul constructs a story of remarkable resonance and power, remembrance and invention.It is the story of a writer's lifelong journey towards an understanding of both the simple stuff of inheritance -- language, character, family history -- and the long interwoven strands of a deeply complicated historical past: "things barely remembered, things released only by the act of writing." What he writes -- and what his release of memory enables us to see -- is a series of extended, illuminated moments in the history of Spanish and British imperialism in the Caribbean: Raleigh's final, shameful expedition to the New World; Francisco Miranda's disastrous invasion of South America in the eighteenth century; the more subtle aggressions of the mid-twentieth-century English writer Foster Morris; the transforming and distorting peregrinations of Blair, the black Trinidadian revolutionary. Each episode is viewed through the clarifying lens of the narrator's own post-colonial experience as a Trinidadian of Indian descent who, during the twilight of the Empire, immigrates to England, reinventing himself in order to escape the very history he is intent upon telling.

The Nobel Prize-winning author delivers a revealing and disturbing book about the American South--from Atlanta to Charleston, Tallahassee to Tuskegee, Nashville to Chapel Hill. - "His comprehension is astute and penetrating.... The book he has written brings new understanding of] the subject." --The New York Times Book Review In the tradition of political and cultural revelation V.S. Naipaul so brilliantly made his own in Among The Believers, A Turn In The South is his first book about the United States. "Naipaul's chapters honor the diversity that marks the South.... Conservatives and liberals, whites and blacks, men and women speak for themselves, and reveal the dark side of the story in their own ways ... fascinating and revealing." --The New Republic "Mr. Naipaul travels with the artist's eye and ear and his observations are sharply discerning." --Evelyn Waugh "A master of English prose." --Nobel Prize Winner J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books "His writing is clean and beautiful, and he has a great eye for nuance.... No American writer could achieve his] kind of evenhandedness, and it gives Naipaul's perceptions an almost built-in originality." --Atlantic Monthly

Explores an isolated African town caught between the modern worlds, as seen through the eyes of an uprooted Indian who comes to live there.

The Nobel Prize-winning author distills his wide experience of countries and peoples into a moving account of the rites of passage endured by all people and all communities undergoing change or decay. - "Naipaul's finest work." --Chicago Tribune"A subtly incisive self-reckoning." --The Washington Post Book World The story of a writer's singular journey - from one place to another, and from one state of mind to another. At the midpoint of the century, the narrator leaves the British colony of Trinidad and comes to the ancient countryside of England. And from within the story of this journey - of departure and arrival, alienation and familiarity, home and homelessness - the writer reveals how, cut off from his "first" life in Trinidad, he enters a "second childhood of seeing and learning." Clearly autobiographical, yet woven through with remarkable invention, The Enigma of Arrival is as rich and complex as any novel we have had from this exceptional writer. "The conclusion is both heart-breaking and bracing: the only antidote to destruction--of dreams, of reality--is remembering. As eloquently as anyone now writing, Naipaul remembers." --Time "Far and away the most curious novel I've read in a long time, and maybe the most hypnotic book I've ever read." --St. Petersburg Times