'Compelling, insightful, often sombrely beautiful' Sunday Telegraph Moving beyond travelogue, The Masque of Africa considers the effects of belief (in indigenous animisms, the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam, the cults of...

The Mystic Masseur, V. S. Naipaul's first published novel, is the story of the rise and rise of Ganesh, from failed primary school teacher and struggling masseur to author, revered mystic and MBE - a journey equally memorable for its...

Taking its title from the strangely frozen picture by the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of Arrival tells the story of a young Indian from the Caribbean arriving in post-imperial England and consciously, over many...

In Half a Life we are introduced to the compelling figure of Willie Chandran. 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...

Set on a troubled Caribbean island - where Asians, Africans, Americans and former British colonials co-exist in a state of suppressed hysteria - Guerrillas is a novel of colonialism and revolution. A white man arrives with his mistress,...

'Brilliant and terrifying' Observer Set in an unnamed African country, the book 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...

In a Free State: The Novel von Naipaul, V. S.

Willie Chandran is 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...

In 1960 the government of Trinidad invited V. S. Naipaul to revisit his native country and record his impressions. In this classic of modern travel writing he has created a deft and remarkably prescient portrait of Trinidad and four...

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, A House for Mr Biswas is V. S. Naipaul's best-loved novel. von Naipaul, V. S.

To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure.Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul first visited India in 1962 at the age of twenty-nine, hoping to settle the ghosts of a painful ancestral past. That...

Miguel Street, V. S. Naipaul's first written work of fiction, is set in a derelict corner of Port of Spain, Trinidad, during World War Two and is narrated by an unnamed, precociously observant neighbourhood boy. We are introduced to a...