1957
The Mystic Masseur
Adaptation of V S Naipaul's Pulitzer prize-winning novel. Ganesh Mandvi is an Indian schoolteacher in Port of Spain, Trinidad. After his father's death, he decides to stay in his home village and attempt to fulfil his dream of becoming a writer. In order to help make ends meet, he takes up his father's trade as a masseur. An apparent miracle turns him into a local legend and sets him on the road to success.
1958
The Suffrage of Elvira
In this book, an old, comically timid and absent-minded man, Surujpat Harbans, runs for office, aided by superstition, bribes, and an aggressive compaign.
1959
Miguel Street
Set during World War II and narrated by an unnamed–but precociously observant–neighborhood boy, Miguel Street is a work of mercurial mood shifts, by turns sweetly melancholy and anarchically funny. It overflows with life on every page.
1961
A House For Mr. Biswas
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.
1962
The Middle Passage
In The Middle Passage, Naipaul watches a Trinidadian movie audience greeting Humphrey Bogarts appearance with cries of That is man! He ventures into a Trinidad slum so insalubrious that the locals call it the Gaza Strip. He follows a racially charged election campaign in British Guiana (now Guyana) and marvels at the Gallic pretension of Martinique society, which maintains the fiction that its roads are extensions of Frances routes nationales.
1963
Mr Stone and the Knights Companion
Shortly before retirement from his post as a librarian in a large commercial firm, sixty-two-year-old Mr. Stone marries, becomes inspired, and turns his creative idea into fact.
1964
An Area of Darkness
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 workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man and a deluded American religious seeker.
1967
A Flag on the Island
A Flag on the Island is a collection of short stories written by V.S. Naipaul, and first published by André Deutsch in 1967. It includes the title novella, "A Flag on the Island," outtakes from previous books such as "The Enemy", from Miguel Street, and pieces published in periodicals in Britain or the United States.
1967
The Mimic Men
Born of Indian heritage and raised on a British-dependent Caribbean island, Ralph Singh has retired to suburban London, writing his memoirs as a means to impose order on a chaotic existence. His memories lead him to recognize the paradox of his childhood during which he secretly fantasized about a heroic India, yet changed his name from Ranjit Kripalsingh. As he assesses his short-lived marriage to an ostentatious white woman, Singh realizes what has kept him from becoming a proper Englishman.
1969
The Loss of El Dorado
The history of Trinidad begins with a delusion: the belief that somewhere nearby on the South American mainland lay El Dorado, the mythical kingdom of gold. In this extraordinary and often gripping book, V. S. Naipaul–himself a native of Trinidad–shows how that delusion drew a small island into the vortex of world events, making it the object of Spanish and English colonial designs and a mecca for treasure-seekers, slave-traders, and revolutionaries.
1971
In A Free State
No writer has rendered our boundariless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. A perfect case in point is this riveting novel, a masterful and stylishly rendered narrative of emigration, dislocation, and dread, accompanied by four supporting narratives.
1972
The Overcrowded Barracoon
Unable to establish industry or to provide employment for young people who have been educated for nonexistent jobs, such countries “export” young people whose only hope is to leave their native countries. In “The Overcrowded Barracoon,” Naipaul dissects Mauritius, a tiny island nation in the Indian Ocean.
1975
Guerillas
Naipaul's Guerrillas is a novel of colonialism and revolution. A white man arrives with his mistress, an Englishwoman influenced by fantasies of native power and sexuality, unaware of the consequences of her actions. ... Guerrillas depicts a convulsion in public life, and ends in private violence.
1976
India: A Wounded Civilization
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.
1979
A Bend in the River
Set in an unnamed African country, V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River is narrated by Salim, a young man from an Indian family of traders long resident on the coast. He believes The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
1980
The Return of Eva Perón with The Killings in Trinidad
The Return of Eva Peron With The Killings In Trinidad. Michael X in Trinidad, Peronism in Argentina, the cult of Kingship in Mobutu's Zaire - the author brings his novelist's questioning to bear upon the "half-made" societies, those still suffering from the profound deprivations of colonialism and prey to corruption.
1981
Among the Believers
In Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey he focuses on the role of religion, as he sees it, in affecting the creative and intellectual resources needed by nations to develop on their own. ... "Among the Believers" exemplifies the Naipaul conviction that it is no favor to a country to withhold negative views of it.
1984
Finding the Center
In the essay, ""Prologue to an Autobiography,'' Naipaul recounts his beginnings as a writer and renders a touching portrait of his father. In ``The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro,'' a study of the Ivory Coast, he delineates two sections of the modern African mind: the Westernized ``day'' mind and that of the ageless, magic-haunted ``night.''
1988
The Enigma of Arrival
Summary. In The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul turns to the situation of the expatriate who lives as an alien in a traditional society. The narrator, a writer from Trinidad, has come to settle in the English countryside.
1989
A Turn In The South
A Turn in the South. A Turn in the South is a travelogue of the American South written by Nobel Prize-winning writer V. S. Naipaul. The book was published in 1989 and is based upon the author's travels in the southern states of the United States.
1990
India: A Million Mutinies Now
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.
1994
A Way In The World
In his long-awaited, vastly innovative new novel, Naipaul, "one of literature's great travelers" (Los Angles Times), spans continents and centuries to create what is at once an autobiography and a fictional archaeology of colonialism."
1999
Between Father and Son: Family Letters
A story of family members oceans apart, clinging to one another against the sadness of dislocation and isolation: The young Naipaul, desperate not for a degree but to become a writer and make his way in the world. His beloved sister Kamla, anxious and bewildered, away at school in India. And his melancholy but loving father, whose own broken dream of succeeding as a writer would be realized in the singular achievement of his son.
2001
Half a Life
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 and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portugese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray.
2002
The Nightwatchman’s Occurrence Book
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 humour.
2002
The Writer and the World
Spanning four decades and four continents, this magisterial volume brings together the essential shorter works of reflection and reportage by our most sensitive, literate, and undeceivable observer of the post-colonial world. In its pages V. S. Naipaul trains his relentless moral intelligence on societies from India to the United States and sees how each deals with the challenges of modernity and the seductions of both the real and mythical past.
2004
Literary Occasions
Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul brings his signature gifts of observation, his ferocious impatience with received truths, and his masterfully condensed prose to these eleven essays on reading, writing, and identity--which have been brought together for the first time.
2004
Magic Seeds
A stunning novel of the present moment that takes us into the hearts and minds of those who use terrorism as an ideal and a way of life, and those who aspire to the frightening power of wealth.
2010
The Masque of Africa
Like all of Naipaul’s “travel” books, The Masque of Africa encompasses a much larger narrative and purpose: to judge 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 civilization. It is a masterly achievement by one of the world’s keenest observers and one of its greatest writers.