V. S Naipaul
Author
Language
English
Description
First published in 1979, a Bend in the River is a novel of the politics and society of postcolonial Africa. Salim, a young Indian man, moves to a town on a bend in the river of a recently independent nation. As Salim strives to establish his business, he comes to be closely involved with the fluid and dangerous politics of the newly created state, the remnants of the old regime clashing inevitably with the new.
Author
Language
English
Description
In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi's "Emergency," V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left one hundred years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.
Drawing on novels, news reports, political memoirs, and his own encounters with ordinary Indians-from...
Author
Language
English
Description
"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...
Author
Language
English
Description
A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul's profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India.
Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government...
5) Magic seeds
Author
Series
Publisher
Distributed by Random House
Pub. Date
2004
Edition
1st American ed.
Physical Desc
280 p. ; 22 cm.
Language
English
Description
Willie Chandran feels as though the life he lives is not his own. But his listlessness washes away in a flood of encouragement from his radically political sister. Inspired, he joins an underground liberation movement in India. But after years of revolution and incarceration, he grows disillusioned and returns to England, still hoping to find his true self.
Author
Publisher
Distributed by Random House
Pub. Date
1994
Edition
1st ed.
Physical Desc
viii, 380 pages ; 22 cm
Language
English
Description
A collection of narratives on the subject of history and the people who make it. One follows the last expedition of Sir Walter Raleigh before he was sent to the Tower, another chronicles Francisco de Miranda's disastrous invasion of South America, a third is about a Panamanian communist in the 1930s.
Author
Publisher
Viking
Pub. Date
1991
Edition
1st American ed.
Physical Desc
521 p. ; 25 cm.
Language
English
Description
Arising out of Naipaul's lifelong obsession and passion for a country that is at once his and totally alien, India: A Million Mutinies Now relates the stories of many of the people he met traveling there more than fifty years ago. He explores how they have been steered by the innumerable frictions present in Indian society - the contradictions and compromises of religious faith, the whim and chaos of random political forces. This book represents Naipaul's...
Author
Publisher
Vintage International
Pub. Date
2002
Edition
1st Vintage International ed.
Physical Desc
222 p. ; 21 cm.
Language
English
Description
"A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more." But to its residents this derelict corner of Trinidad's capital is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. There's Popo the carpenter, who neglects his livelihood to build "the thing without a name." There's Man-man, who goes from running for public office to staging his own crucifixion, and the dreaded Big Foot, the...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker-Prize winning author V.S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that...
10) Half a life
Author
Series
Publisher
Knopf
Pub. Date
2001
Edition
1st American ed.
Physical Desc
211 p. ; 22 cm.
Language
English
Description
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 immigrant...
13) Guerrillas
Author
Publisher
Knopf
Pub. Date
1975
Edition
1st American ed.
Physical Desc
248 p. ; 23 cm.
Language
English
Formats
Description
On an unnamed Caribbean Island, political tensions provoked by race and poverty are high. Jimmy Ahmed, a young mixed-race man, has been hailed as a revolutionary leader of the people. Roche, imprisoned for activities against South Africa's apartheid regime, and Jane, a feckless English rich girl wanting to feel a part of something bigger, get sucked into the turmoil and world of Ahmed. But does anyone achieve anything by causing unrest? Do any of...
Author
Publisher
Blackstone Publishing
Pub. Date
[2018]
Edition
Unabridged.
Physical Desc
16 audio discs (19 1/2 hr.) : CD audio, digital ; 4 3/4 in.
Language
English
Description
V.S. Naipaul's legendary command of broad comedy and acute social observation is on abundant display in these classic works of fiction-two novels and a collection of stories-that capture the rhythms of life in the Caribbean and England with impressive subtlety and humor. The Suffrage of Elvira is Naipaul's hilarious take on an electoral campaign in the back country of Trinidad, where the candidates' tactics include blatant vote-buying and supernatural...
Author
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
Pub. Date
2010
Edition
1st North American ed.
Physical Desc
241 p. ; 25 cm.
Language
English
Description
Nobel Prize-winning author Naipaul spirals outward from the central African country of Uganda, to Nigeria, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Gabon, and concluding in South Africa, to unearth in six chapters a sense of African ancestral belief and practice.
17) Three novels
Author
Publisher
Knopf
Pub. Date
1982
Edition
1st ed.
Physical Desc
502 p. ; 25 cm.
Language
English
Author
Publisher
Random House
Pub. Date
©1998
Edition
1st U.S. ed.
Physical Desc
xiii, 408 pages ; 25 cm
Language
English
Description
In a follow-up to Among the Believers, Naipaul returns after seventeen years to Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia to determine the effects on these countries brought by conversion to Islam.