Download or read book The Enigma of Arrival written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nobel Prize-winning author distills his wide experience of countries and peoples into a moving account of the rites of passage endured by all people and all communities undergoing change or decay. • "Naipaul's finest work." —Chicago Tribune "A subtly incisive self-reckoning." —The Washington Post Book World The story of a writer’s singular journey – from one place to another, and from one state of mind to another. At the midpoint of the century, the narrator leaves the British colony of Trinidad and comes to the ancient countryside of England. And from within the story of this journey – of departure and arrival, alienation and familiarity, home and homelessness – the writer reveals how, cut off from his “first” life in Trinidad, he enters a “second childhood of seeing and learning.” Clearly autobiographical, yet woven through with remarkable invention, The Enigma of Arrival is as rich and complex as any novel we have had from this exceptional writer. "The conclusion is both heart-breaking and bracing: the only antidote to destruction—of dreams, of reality—is remembering. As eloquently as anyone now writing, Naipaul remembers." —Time "Far and away the most curious novel I've read in a long time, and maybe the most hypnotic book I've ever read." —St. Petersburg Times

Download or read book A Bend in the River written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the "brilliant novel" (The New York Times) V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man — an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.

Download or read book Enigma of China written by Qiu Xiaolong and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighth novel in Qiu Xiaolong's acclaimed Chinese crime series sees Inspector Chen confronted by a terrible choice between Party politics or his principles - with his career at stake

Download or read book A Turn in the South written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-03-30 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nobel Prize-winning author delivers a revealing and disturbing book about the American South—from Atlanta to Charleston, Tallahassee to Tuskegee, Nashville to Chapel Hill. • “His comprehension is astute and penetrating.... The book he has written brings new understanding [of] the subject.” —The New York Times Book Review In the tradition of political and cultural revelation V.S. Naipaul so brilliantly made his own in Among The Believers, A Turn In The South is his first book about the United States. “Naipaul’s chapters honor the diversity that marks the South.... Conservatives and liberals, whites and blacks, men and women speak for themselves, and reveal the dark side of the story in their own ways … fascinating and revealing.” —The New Republic “Mr. Naipaul travels with the artist’s eye and ear and his observations are sharply discerning.” —Evelyn Waugh “A master of English prose.” —Nobel Prize Winner J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books "His writing is clean and beautiful, and he has a great eye for nuance.... No American writer could achieve [his] kind of evenhandedness, and it gives Naipaul's perceptions an almost built-in originality." —Atlantic Monthly

Download or read book Half a Life written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the finest living writers in the English language, V. S. Naipaul gives us a tale as wholly unexpected as it is affecting, his first novel since the exultantly acclaimed A Way in the World, published seven years ago. Half a Life is the story of Willie Chandran, whose father, heeding the call of Mahatma Gandhi, turned his back on his brahmin heritage and married a woman of low caste—a disastrous union he would live to regret, as he would the children that issued from it. When Willie reaches manhood, his flight from the travails of his mixed birth takes him from India to London, where, in the shabby haunts of immigrants and literary bohemians of the 1950s, he contrives a new identity. This is what happens as he tries to defeat self-doubt in sexual adventures and in the struggle to become a writer—strivings that bring him to the brink of exhaustion, from which he is rescued, to his amazement, only by the love of a good woman. And this is what happens when he returns with her—carried along, really—to her home in Africa, to live, until the last doomed days of colonialism, yet another life not his own. In a luminous narrative that takes us across three continents, Naipaul explores his great theme of inheritance with an intimacy and directness unsurpassed in his extraordinary body of work. And even as he lays bare the bitter comical ironies of assumed identities, he gives us a poignant spectacle of the enervation peculiar to a borrowed life. In one man’s determined refusal of what he has been given to be, Naipaul reveals the way of all our experience. As Willie comes to see, “Everything goes on a bias. The world should stop, but it goes on.” A masterpiece of economy and emotional nuance, Half a Life is an indelible feat of the imagination.

Download or read book Enigma written by Catherine Coulter and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The highly anticipated twenty-first FBI thriller by #1 New York Times bestselling author Catherine Coulter presents Agents Savich and Sherlock with two baffling mysteries. Working with Agent Cam Wittier (Insidious) and New York-based former Special Forces agent Jack Cabot, they must race against the clock to catch an international criminal and solve the enigma of the man called John Doe. When Agent Dillon Savich saves Kara Moody from a seemingly crazy man, he doesn’t realize he will soon be facing a scientist who wants to live forever and is using “John Doe” to help him. But when the scientist, Lister Maddox, loses him, he ups the stakes and targets another to take his experiments to the next level. It’s a race against time literally as Savich and Sherlock rush to stop him and save both present and future victims of his experiments. In the meantime, Cam Wittier and Jack Cabot must track a violent criminal through the Daniel Boone National Forest. When he escapes through a daring rescue, the agents have to find out who set his escape in motion and how it all ties into the murder of Mia Prevost, the girlfriend of the president’s Chief of Staff’s only son, Saxton Hainny. It’s international intrigue at the highest levels and they know they have to succeed or national security is compromised. Featuring Coulter’s signature “breakneck plot and magnetic characters” (Huffington Post), Enigma is a shocking thrill ride that will keep the you turning pages as fast as you can.

Download or read book Guerrillas written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-13 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Nobel Prize-winning author comes a novel of exile, displacement, and the agonizing cruelty and pain of colonialism, both for those who rule and those who are their victims. “A brilliant novel in every way.… [It] shimmers with artistic certainty.” —The New York Times Book Review Set on a troubled Carribbean island, where “everybody wants to fight his own little war,” where “everyone is a guerrilla,” the novel centers on an Englishman named Roche, once a hero of the South African resistance, who has come to the island – subdued now, almost withdrawn – to work and to help. Soon his English mistress arrives: casually nihilistic, bored, quickly enticed – excited – by fantasies of native power and sexuality, and blindly unaware of any possible consequences of her acts. At once Roche and Jane are drawn into fatal connection with a young guerrilla leader named Jimmy Ahmed, a man driven by his own raging fantasies of power, of perverse sensuality, and of the England he half remembers, half sentimentalizes. Against the larger anguish of the world they inhabit, these three act out a drama of death, hideous sexual violence, and political and spiritual impotence that profoundly reflects the ravages history can make on human lives.

Download or read book Love in the Days of Rage written by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2001-10-02 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The more I make love, the more I want revolution; the more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.†? In Paris, in May of 1968, revolution, and love are very much in the air. The barricades are going up, the students of the Sorbonne are taking to streets alive with the graffiti of revolt, and the Odeon is ablaze with speechmaking. For Annie, a young American painter, and Julian, her Portuguese lover, a banker and anarchist, the events of that Paris spring form the backdrop against which their love affair is played. Annie sees the world through an artist's eyes; she is reckless in her passions, wanting and needing love with other people. There is none of this fanciful nonsense for Julian, an anarchist disdainful of the entire human race, who thinks even the enraged students storming the streets of Paris with their posters proclaiming “open the windows of your heart†? and “revolution is the ecstasy of history†? to be hopelessly naïve and sheeplike. Ferlinghetti charts the progress of love unfolding against those heady and momentous days when the pampered children of the bourgeoisie tried to find common cause with workers who despised them, “when Julian and Annie were in the heat of their love and reason.†?

Download or read book Miguel Street written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To the residents of Miguel Street, a derelict corner of Trinidad’s capital, their neighbourhood 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;” Man-man, who goes from running for public office to staging his own crucifixion; Big Foot, the dreaded bully with glass tear ducts; and the lovely Mrs. Hereira, in thrall to her monstrous husband. Their lives (and the legends their neighbours construct around them) are rendered by V. S. Naipaul with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion in this tender, funny novel.

Download or read book The Masque of Africa written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2010-10-19 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Africa is critical for all concerned with the world today: in what promises to be his final great work of reportage, one of the keenest observers of the continent surveys the effects of belief and religion on the disparate peoples of Africa. The Masque of Africa is Nobel Prize-winning V. S. Naipaul's first major work of non-fiction to be published since his internationally bestselling Beyond Belief. Like all of Naipaul's great works of non-fiction, The Masque of Africa is superficially a book of travels — full of people, stories and landscapes he visits — but it also encompasses a larger narrative and purpose: to judge the effects of belief (whether in indigenous animisms, faiths imposed by other cultures, or even the cults of leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of civilization.

Download or read book A Way in the World written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nobel Prize-winning author—and "one of literature's great travelers" (Los Angeles Times)—spans continents and centuries to create what is at once an autobiography and a fictional archaeology of colonialism. "Dickensian … a brilliant new prism through which to view (Naipaul's) life and work."—The New York Times “Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever: we go back all of us to the very beginning: in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings.” So observes the opening narrator of A Way in the World, and it is this conundrum—that the bulk of our inheritance must remain beyond our grasp—which suffuses this extraordinary work of fiction. Returning to the autobiographical mode he so brilliantly explored in The Enigma of Arrival, and writing here in the classic form of linked narrations, Naipaul constructs a story of remarkable resonance and power, remembrance and invention. It is the story of a writer’s lifelong journey towards an understanding of both the simple stuff of inheritance — language, character, family history — and the long interwoven strands of a deeply complicated historical past: “things barely remembered, things released only by the act of writing.” What he writes — and what his release of memory enables us to see — is a series of extended, illuminated moments in the history of Spanish and British imperialism in the Caribbean: Raleigh’s final, shameful expedition to the New World; Francisco Miranda’s disastrous invasion of South America in the eighteenth century; the more subtle aggressions of the mid-twentieth-century English writer Foster Morris; the transforming and distorting peregrinations of Blair, the black Trinidadian revolutionary. Each episode is viewed through the clarifying lens of the narrator’s own post-colonial experience as a Trinidadian of Indian descent who, during the twilight of the Empire, immigrates to England, reinventing himself in order to escape the very history he is intent upon telling.

Download or read book The World is what it is written by Patrick French and published by Picador USA. This book was released on 2008 with total page 555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: V.S. Naipaul is the most compelling literary figure of the last fifty years. Producing, uniquely, masterpieces of both fiction and non-fiction, his is a gift born of a forceful, visionary impulse. With great feeling for his formidable body of work, and exclusive access to his private papers and personal recollections, Patrick French has produced a luminous and astonishing account of this enigmatic genius. V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, into an Indian family. French examines early privations, Naipaul’s life within a displaced community and his talent and fierce ambition at school, which won him a scholarship to Oxford at the age of seventeen. He describes how, once in England, homesickness and depression struck with great force, and the ways in which Naipaul, supported by his first wife, overcame his ‘double exile’, culminating in the production of early masterpieces such as A House for Mr Biswas, An Area of Darkness and In a Free State . Through the uncertainties of life in London, and later in Wiltshire, Naipaul and his wife were to stay together for over four decades, even after he embarked on an intense twenty-five-year love affair. As his reputation grew, as prizes and accolades were bestowed, as a second wave of breathtaking creation generated A Bend in the River, Among the Believers and The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul found and sustained an extraordinary position both outside and at the centre of literary culture. Researched with the full cooperation of its Nobel Prize-winning subject, Patrick French traces with sympathetic brilliance and devastating insight the roots of V.S. Naipaul’s unparalleled gift, in what will become a landmark in biography.

Download or read book The Middle Passage written by V. S. Naipaul and published by Picador USA. This book was released on 1962 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Naipul's first work of travel writing is an account of his journey in 1950 from London to his birthplace, Trinidad. He offers a record of his impressions there and elsewhere in the West Indies and South America, and examines their common heritage of colonialism and slavery.

Download or read book China Room written by Sunjeev Sahota and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thrilling and heartbreaking story of love, family, survival and betrayal - from the prize-winning author of The Year of the Runaways. * A Book of the Year for The Times, Guardian and Daily Telegraph * 'A gorgeous, gripping read' Kamila Shamsie 'A multi-generational masterpiece' Daily Mail Mehar, a young bride in rural Punjab, is trying to discover the identity of her new husband. It is 1929, and she and her sisters-in-law - married to three brothers in a single ceremony - spend their days hard at work on the family farm, sequestered from contact with the men. When Mehar develops a theory as to which of them is hers, a passion is ignited that will put more than one life at risk. Spiralling around Mehar's story is that of a young man who in 1999 flees from England to the deserted sun-scorched farm. Can a summer spent learning of love and of his family's past give him the strength for the journey home? Shortlisted for the 2022 Rathbones Folio Prize Longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize Longlisted for the 2022 Walter Scott Prize 'Amazing storytelling...gripping and very moving' BBC Radio 4, Open Book 'I'm blown away by it' Tessa Hadley 'The stuff of miracles' Bryan Washington 'Moving...fresh and nourishing' The Times

Download or read book V S Naipaul s Journeys written by Sanjay Krishnan and published by . This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sanjay Krishnan rereads V. S. Naipaul's work to offer new perspectives on his achievements, shortcomings, trajectory, and complicated legacy. While recognizing the flaws and prejudices that shaped and limited Naipaul's life and art, this book challenges the binaries that have restricted discussions of his writing.

Download or read book V S Naipaul written by Mohit Kumar Ray and published by Atlantic Publishers & Dist. This book was released on 2002 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: V.S. Naipaul Has Claimed That All His Work Is Really One And He Has Been Writing One Big Book All These Years; Also, Considering The World He Has Stepped Into And The World He Has To Look At, He Cannot Be A Professional Novelist In The Old Sense. In His Early Youth Naipaul Took Up The Vocation Of A Writer As His Religion And, Since The Beginning Five Decades Ago, Has Drawn On His Intensely Personal Experience Of An Uprooted Person Adrift In The World, His Experience Of The Two Worlds To None Of Which He Could Really Belong An Experience That Imparts The Authentic Voice To His Works Both Non-Fiction And Fiction Enriched By A Distinct Autobiographical Flavour. Naipaul Himself Is Split Into His Characters In Whom Are Manifested Subtle Shades Of His Emotions And Traits. He Is Accidental Man, Dangling Man, History Man And The Mimic Man All Rolled Into One. Naipaul Is Also One Of Literature S Great Travellers, And His Absorption Into The Experience Of Rootlessness, The Alienating Effects Of Colonial Past On Today S Postcolonial People Has Taken Him To Africa, South America, India And All Over The World Not In Search Of Roots But In Search Of Rootlessness, And Has Yielded A Rich Harvest Of Travelogues Which Are About Much More Than Travel.An Author Of A Large Number Of Fictional And Non-Fictional Works, Naipaul Continues To Surprise, Excite, Provoke And Move Readers At Every Turn Of His Literary Voyage. Naipaul Has Unseverable Emotional Bond With India Which Remains For Him An Area Of Pain, An Ache For Which One Has A Great Tenderness Yet From Which He Wishes To Separate Himself. The World Of V.S. Naipaul Is The World Of Two Worlds. The Present Volumes Of Papers On Naipaul, Led By Naipaul S Nobel Lecture, Offer Illuminating Perspectives And Interesting Explorations Into This Rich, Enigmatic, Sad, Hilarious, And Fascinating World Of Naipaul.

Download or read book The Postcolonial Exotic written by Graham Huggan and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Graham Huggan examines some of the processes by which value is given to postcolonial works within their cultural field using both literary-critical and sociological methods of analysis.