{"title":"Books by V.S. Naipaul","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781529013016","title":"A House for Mr Biswas","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eHeart-rending and darkly comic, V.S. Naipaul's \u003ci\u003eA House for Mr Biswas\u003c\/i\u003e has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels, a classic that evokes a man's quest for autonomy against the backdrop of post-colonial Trinidad.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eHe was struck again and again by the wonder of being in his own house, the audacity of it: to walk in through his own front gate, to bar entry to whoever he wished, to close his doors and windows every night.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMr. Biswas has been told since the day of his birth that misfortune will follow him – and so it has. Meaning only to avoid punishment, he causes the death of his father and the dissolution of his family.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWanting simply to flirt with a beautiful woman, he ends up marrying her, and reluctantly relying on her domineering family for support. 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An Asian West Indian in London. Both are far from home and both are desperately trying to build a new life in a deeply unfamiliar world. In between them lies the landscape of an unnamed country, a brutal place reminiscent of Idi Amin’s Uganda. This central story is about those who once thought of Africa as liberating, but now find themselves in an increasingly harsher reality.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWinner of the Booker Prize in 1971, \u003ci\u003eIn a Free State\u003c\/i\u003e is one of Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul’s many towering literary achievements. It is a story of the desperation and heartbreak we find in those who are displaced and who try, often in vain, to make a home in their new surroundings. Frightening, disquieting and merciless, this is one of Naipaul’s greatest novels: fraught but full of pity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePart of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44583429865650,"sku":"9781035039180","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781035039180_d3d99066-f1fa-465e-8948-3dc8eed27ee0.jpg?v=1786016972"},{"product_id":"9781035051809","title":"An Area of Darkness","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e‘His narrative skill is spectacular. One returns with pleasure to the slow hand-in-hand revelations of both India and himself’ – \u003ci\u003eThe Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eAn Area of Darkness\u003c\/i\u003e is V. S. Naipaul’s semi-autobiographical account of his first visit to India, the land of his forebears. At once painful and hilarious, but always thoughtful and considered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe was twenty-nine years old; he stayed for a year. From the moment of his inauspicious arrival in Prohibition-dry Bombay, bearing whisky and cheap brandy, he experienced a cultural estrangement from the subcontinent. It became for him a land of myths, an area of darkness closing up behind him as he travelled . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe experience was not a pleasant one, but the pain the author suffered was creative rather than numbing, and engendered a masterful work of literature that is revelatory both of India and of himself: a displaced person who paradoxically possesses a stronger sense of place than almost anyone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eNow part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":44583460667570,"sku":"9781035051809","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":57685913796981,"sku":"9781529032109","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781035051809.jpg?v=1792599151"},{"product_id":"9781035061051","title":"Magic Seeds","description":"In V. S. Naipaul's Magic Seeds we follow Willie Chandran, a man who has allowed one identity after another to be thrust upon him. In his early forties, after a peripatetic life, he succumbs to the encouragement of his sister – and his own listlessness – and joins an underground movement in India. But years of revolutionary campaigns and then prison convince him that the revolution ‘had nothing to do with what we were fighting for’, and he feels himself further than ever ‘from his own history’.   When he returns to Britain where, thirty years before, his wanderings began, Willie encounters a country that has turned its back on its past and, like him, has become detached from its own history. He endures the indignities of a culture dissipated by reform and compromise until, in a moment of grotesque revelation – a tour de force of parodic savagery from our most visionary of writers – Willie comes to an understanding that might finally allow him to release his true self.   ‘A radical further step in one of the great imaginative careers of our time . . . Magic Seeds demands our attention, and nothing more authoritative will be published this year’ – Philip Hensher, Daily TelegraphNow part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54926518223221,"sku":"9781035061051","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781035061051_6bb1bab0-b497-4fdc-abac-3d5772676279.jpg?v=1786017517"},{"product_id":"9781035039050","title":"Among the Believers","description":"\u003cp\u003e‘This book investigates the Islamic revolution and tries to understand the fundamentalist zeal that has gripped the young in Iran and other Muslim countries . . . He is a modern master.’ – \u003ci\u003eSunday Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eReissued in the Picador Collection, \u003ci\u003eAmong the Believers \u003c\/i\u003eis V. S. Naipaul’s classic account of his journeys through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. ‘The believers’ are the Muslims he met on those journeys, young men and women battling to regain the original purity of their faith in the hope of restoring order to a chaotic world. It is a uniquely valuable insight into modern Islam and the comforting simplifications of religious fanaticism.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePart of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e‘His travel writing is perhaps the most important body of work of its kind in the second half of the century.’ - Martin Amis, author of \u003ci\u003eTime's Arrow\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Zone of Interest\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55205851660661,"sku":"9781035039050","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781035039050.jpg?v=1786016965"},{"product_id":"9781035061198","title":"India: A Wounded Civilization","description":"‘A devastating work, but proof that a novelist of Naipaul’s stature can often define problems quicker and more effectively than a team of economists and other experts’ – The TimesIn 1964 V. S. Naipaul published An Area of Darkness, his semi-autobiographical account of a year in India. Two visits later, prompted by the Emergency of 1975, he came to write India: A Wounded Civilization.   In this work, he casts a more analytical eye than before over Indian attitudes, while recapitulating and further probing the feelings aroused in him by this vast, mysterious, and agonized country. What he saw and heard – evoked so superbly and vividly in these pages – reinforced in him a conviction that India, wounded by a thousand years of foreign rule, had not yet found an ideology of regeneration.   A work of fierce candour and precision, it is also a generous description of one man’s complicated relationship with the country of his ancestors.   The second book in V. S. Naipaul's acclaimed Indian trilogy, India: A Wounded Civilization follows An Area of Darkness. The series concludes with India: A Million Mutinies Now.   Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55206085886325,"sku":"9781035061198","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781035061198.jpg?v=1786017520"},{"product_id":"9781035061730","title":"The Masque of Africa","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eMoving beyond travelogue, V. S. Naipaul's \u003ci\u003eThe Masque of Africa\u003c\/i\u003e considers the effects of belief (in indigenous animisms, the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam, the cults of leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of African civilization.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBeginning in Uganda, at the centre of the continent, Naipaul’s journey takes in Ghana and Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Gabon, and ends, as the country does, in South Africa.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFocusing upon the theme of belief – though sometimes the political or economical realities are so overwhelming that they have to be taken into account – Naipaul examines the fragile but enduring quality of the old world of magic. To witness the ubiquity of such ancient ritual, to be given some idea of its power, was to be taken far back to the beginning of things. To reach that beginning was the purpose of this book.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e‘The quality of Naipaul’s writing – simple, concise, engaging – rarely varies . . . Above all, Naipaul’s latest African journey is eyewitness reporting at its best’ – \u003ci\u003eTime\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePart of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55896350982517,"sku":"9781035061730","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781035061730_4076357d-f590-47bc-836f-95ec6bf697e4.jpg?v=1786017535"},{"product_id":"9781035061754","title":"The Enigma of Arrival","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA beautifully rendered work of autofiction from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTaking its title from the strangely frozen picture by the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico, \u003ci\u003eThe Enigma of Arrival\u003c\/i\u003e tells the story of a young Indian from the Caribbean arriving in post-imperial England and consciously, over many years, finding himself as a writer. It is the story of a journey, from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England, and from one state of mind to another, and is perhaps V.S. Naipaul’s most autobiographical work. Yet alongside this he weaves a rich and complex web of invention and observation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFinding depth and pathos in the smallest moments – the death of a cottager, the firing of an estate’s gardener – Naipaul also comprehends the bigger picture – watching as the old world is lost to the gradual but permanent changes wrought on the English landscape by the march of ‘progress’.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e‘Written with the expected beauty of style . . . Instead of diminishing life, Naipaul ennobles it’ – Anthony Burgess, \u003ci\u003eThe Observer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eNow part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":55896355111285,"sku":"9781035061754","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":57686008299893,"sku":"9781529013047","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781035061754.jpg?v=1792599352"},{"product_id":"9781035061204","title":"The Mystic Masseur","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Mystic Masseur\u003c\/i\u003e, V. S. Naipaul’s first published novel set on his native Trinidad, is the story of the rise of Ganesh. From failed primary school teacher and struggling masseur to author, revered mystic and MBE, \u003ci\u003eThe Mystic Masseur \u003c\/i\u003eis a journey equally memorable for its hilarity as its bewildering success.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn unforgettable cast of characters witness this meteoric ascent: Ganesh’s father-in-law, Ramlogan, whose shop gave the impression that ‘every morning someone went over everything in it – scales, Ramlogan, and all – with a greased rag’; his aunt, the Great Belcher, with her troubling wind; his wife Leela, and her fondness for putting a punctuation mark after every word. Soon, Ganesh’s small hut is filled with books (1,500, as his wife will attest), and his trousers and shirt disappear to be replaced by more suitable attire for a proper mystic. As ‘The Woman Who Couldn’t Eat’ and ‘Lover Boy’, the man who fell in love with his bicycle, line up to be cured, it looks like the mystic masseur is surely destined for greatness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn one of the author’s finest comic creations we see the immense sensitivity, humour and endlessly inventive imagination that have become the hallmarks of V. S. 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Naipaul offers a personal choice of examples of Spanish and British imperial history in the Caribbean, including an imagined vision of Raleigh’s last expedition and an introduction to Francisco de Miranda, a would-be liberator and precursor to Bolívar, which are placed within a context of echoing modernity and framed by two more personal, heavily autobiographical sections sketching the narrator – an eloquent yet humble man of Indian descent who grew up in Trinidad but spent much of his adult life in England and Africa.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Meditative and dramatic, these historical reconstructions, imbued with Naipaul’s acute perception, drawn with his deft and sensitive touch, and told in his beautifully wrought prose, are transmuted into an astonishing novel exploring the profound and mysterious effect of history on the individual.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56285770908021,"sku":"9780330522885","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780330522885_1e4f1724-69d8-481e-9118-104d48d685a4.jpg?v=1786013622"},{"product_id":"9780330522953","title":"The Middle Passage","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eV. 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Haunted by the legacies of slavery and colonialism, and so thoroughly defined by the norms of Empire that it can scarcely comprehend its end, Naipaul catches this poor, topsy-turvy world at a critical moment, a time when racial and political assertion had yet to catch up – a perfect subject for the acute understanding and dazzling prose of this great writer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e ‘Naipaul travels with the artist’s eye and ear and his observations are sharply discerning.’ Evelyn Waugh\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e ‘Belongs in the same category of travel writing as Lawrence’s books on Italy, Greene’s on West Africa and Pritchett’s on Spain’ \u003ci\u003eNew Statesman\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56286485512565,"sku":"9780330522953","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780330522953_236ca1c3-5f0e-4a19-a21e-6f6defceebae.jpg?v=1786013625"},{"product_id":"9780330524803","title":"In a Free State","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWinner of the Booker Prize 1971 and nominated for the Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eIn a Free State\u003c\/i\u003e tells the story first of an Indian servant in Washington, who becomes an American citizen but feels he has ceased to be a part of the flow. Then of a disturbed Asian West Indian in London who, in jail for murder, has never really known where he is. Then the central novel moves to Africa, to a fictional country somewhere like Uganda or Rwanda. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe novel's central characters once found Africa liberating, but now it has gone sour on them. The land is no longer safe, and at a time of tribal conflict they have to make the long drive to the safety of their compound. At the end of this drive – the narrative tight, wonderfully constructed, the formal and precise language always instilled with violence and rage – we know everything about the English characters, the African country and the Idi Amin-like future awaiting it. This is one of V. S. 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Now his finest pieces of reflection and reportage – many of which have been unavailable for some time – are collected in one volume.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e With an abiding faith in modernity balanced by a sense of wonder about the past, Naipaul has explored an astonishing variety of societies and peoples through the prism of his experience. 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Springing from the unhappy union of a low-caste mother and a father constantly at odds with life, Willie is naively eager to find something that will place him both in and apart from the world. Drawn to England, and to the immigrant and bohemian communities of post-war London, it is only in his first experience of love that he finally senses the possibility of fulfilment.   In its humorous and sensitive vision of the half-lives quietly lived out at the centre of our world, V. S. Naipaul’s graceful novel brings its own unique illumination to essential aspects of our shared history.   Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.   ‘Parts are as sly and funny as anything Naipaul has written. 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