V. S Naipaul
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English
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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.
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Everyman's library volume 213
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English
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Owning a small portion of the Trinidad earth and a respectable house of his own is the dream that sustains Mohun Biswas through a life of frustration and despair after he marries into the domineering Tulsi family.
3) Half a life
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English
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In a narrative that moves with dreamlike swiftness from India to England to Africa, the Nobel Prize-winning author produced his finest novel, a bleakly resonant study of the fraudulent bargains that make up an identity."A masterpiece." —Los Angeles Times Book ReviewThe 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...
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"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...
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English
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Journalist-novelist Naipaul tells of an India gone wrong, filled with economic and political corruption. Much has changed since his 1962 trip: violence between conflicting religions and a greedy society obsessed with self-interest has smashed the idealism and hope of Nehru's developing secular India, as percolating ideas of freedom shake loose the old moral ethos rooted in caste and class. This kaleidoscopic travelogue concentrates on urban life while...
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English
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"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...
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English
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In a vastly innovative novel, Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul intertwines memory and history to create what is at once an autobiography and an ambitious fictional archaeology of colonialism.Spanning continents and centuries and defying literary categories, A Way in the World tells intersecting stories whose protagonists include the disgraced and half-demented Sir Walter Raleigh who seeks El Dorado in the New World; the nineteenth-century insurgent...
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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...
14) Magic seeds
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English
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Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul's magnificent Magic Seeds continues the story of Willie Chandran, the perennially dissatisfied and self-destructively naive protagonist of his bestselling Half a Life. Having left a wife and a livelihood in Africa, Willie is persuaded to return to his native India to join an underground movement on behalf of its oppressed lower castes. Instead he finds himself in the company of dilettantes and psychopaths, relentlessly...
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The first of Naipaul's twelve novels tells of one man's meteoric rise and hilarious metamorphosis from failed schoolteacher and struggling masseur to the most popular man in Trinidad. In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel, Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul traces the unlikely career of Ganesh Ramsumair, a failed schoolteacher and impecunious village masseur who in time becomes a revered mystic, a thriving entrepreneur, and the most beloved...
16) The mimic men
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English
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Former government minister Ralph Singh is the perpetual outsider: displaced, disillusioned and now living in exile, Ralph reflects on his earlier life and the searing effects of colonialism. Ralph's constant estrangement sees him ever attempting to fit into various communities, only to find home in more transient spaces. Born on the tropical island of Isabella, he is one of West India's many 'Mimic Men'. Booker and Nobel Prize-winning author V.S....
17) Guerrillas
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English
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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...
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English
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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...