V. S. Naipaul Books

A cultural history describing how folklore studies and the music industry helped to create a musical color line in the South, associating certain genres with particular racial and ethnic identities.

This is a further volume in the ongoing reissue of the backlist of V.S. Naipaul, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.

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. Amid massacres and poisonings, plunder and multinational intrigue, two themes emerge: the grinding down of the Aborigines during the long rivalries of the El Dorado quest and, two hundred years later, the man-made horror of slavery. An accumulation of casual, awful detail takes us as close as we can get to day-to-day life in the slave colony, where, in spite of various titles of nobility, only an opportunistic, near-lawless community exists, always fearful of slave suicide or poison, of African sorcery and revolt. Naipaul tells this labyrinthine story with assurance, withering irony, and lively sympathy. The result is historical writing at its highest level.

A magnet to the poets, philosophers, teachers, troubadours and misfits who people the town of Port of Spain, Miguel Street is a place where tales of glory and debauchery vie with declarations of love and anger, where neighbourhood dramas are scrutinized and wisdom doled out to one and all.

Offers an account of the author's literary beginnings and growth and a narrative of a journey into the tribal and modern life of the Ivory Coast.

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

The Nobel Prize-winning author gives us – on the basis of his own intensive seventeen month journey across the Asian continent – an unprecedented revelation of the Islamic world. • “A brilliant report…. A book of scathing inquiry and judgment, whose tragic power is being continually reinforced by current events” (Newsweek). With all the narrative power and intellectual authority that have distinguished his earlier books and won him international acclaim (“There can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses him” – Irving Howe, The New York Times Book Review), Naipaul explores the life, the culture, the ferment inside the nations of Islam – in a book that combines the fascinations of the great works of travel literature with the insights of a uniquely sharp, original, and idiosyncratic political mind. He takes us into four countries in the throes of “Islamization” – countries that, in their ardor to build new societies based entirely on the fundamental laws of Islam, have violently rejected the “materialism” of the technologically advanced nations that have long supported them. He brings us close to the people of Islam – how they live and work, the role of faith in their lives, how they see their place in the modern world.

A gripping masterpiece, hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels.

Mr Biswas is a man who is not naturally rebellious, but in whom rebellion is inspired by the forces of ritual, myth and custom. Though he has married into the family, Mr Biswas remains an outsider and refuses to follow the family in their habitual devotions.