“V. S. Naipaul is the world’s writer, a master of language and perception.” —New York Times Book Review
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- The Nightwatchman’s Occurrence Book, and Other Comic Inventions
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Read by Simon Vance, Ron Butler, and Vikas Adam
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Release Date: 12/24/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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 humor.
The Suffrage of Elvira is Naipaul’s hilarious take on an electoral campaign in the back country of Trinidad, where the candidates’ tactics include blatant vote-buying and supernatural sabotage. The eponymous protagonist of Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion is an aging Englishman of ponderously regular habits whose life is thrown into upheaval by a sudden marriage and unanticipated professional advancement. And the stories in A Flag on the Island take us from a Chinese bakery in Trinidad—whose black proprietor faces bankruptcy until he takes a Chinese name—to a rooming house in London—where the genteel landlady plays a nasty Darwinian game with her budgerigars.
Unfailingly stylish, filled with intelligence and feeling, here is the work of a writer who can do just about anything that can be done with language.
- The Nightwatchman’s Occurrence Book, and Other Comic Inventions
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Read by Simon Vance, Ron Butler, and Vikas Adam
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Release Date: 12/24/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Mystic Masseur
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Read by Ron Butler
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Release Date: 11/27/18
Formats: Digital Audy
The first of Naipaul’s twelve novels tells of one man’s meteoric rise and hilarious metamorphosis from failed schoolteacher and struggling masseur to the most popular man in Trinidad.
In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel, Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul traces the unlikely career of Ganesh Ramsumair, a failed schoolteacher and impecunious village masseur who in time becomes a revered mystic, a thriving entrepreneur, and the most beloved politician in Trinidad. To understand a little better, one has to realize that in the 1940s masseurs were the island’s medical practitioners of choice. As one character observes, “I know the sort of doctors they have in Trinidad. They think nothing of killing two, three people before breakfast.”
Ganesh’s ascent is variously aided and impeded by a Dickensian cast of rogues and eccentrics. There’s his skeptical wife, Leela, whose schooling has made her excessively, fond. of; punctuation: marks!; and Leela’s father, Ramlogan, a man of startling mood changes and an ever-ready cutlass. There’s the aunt known as The Great Belcher. There are patients pursued by malign clouds or afflicted with an amorous fascination with bicycles. Witty, tender, filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of Trinidad’s dusty Indian villages, The Mystic Masseur is Naipaul at his most expansive and evocative.
- The Mystic Masseur
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Read by Ron Butler
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Release Date: 11/27/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Guerrillas
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Read by Ron Butler
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Release Date: 10/16/18
Formats: Digital Audy
On an unnamed Caribbean Island, political tensions provoked by race and poverty are high. Jimmy Ahmed, a young mixed-race man, has been hailed as a revolutionary leader of the people. Roche, imprisoned for activities against South Africa’s apartheid regime, and Jane, a feckless English rich girl wanting to feel a part of something bigger, get sucked into the turmoil and world of Ahmed. But does anyone achieve anything by causing unrest? Do any of them really want freedom in a new society or just the old society with themselves at the helm of power?
Written in the politically turbulent 1970s, Guerrillas takes aim at the sacred cows and myths of revolutionaries—how so many of them “huff and puff,” knowing that the house will never blow down. From the safest places come the bravest words.
Naipaul’s bleak tale also takes aim at flaws in Marxist and revolutionary ideology—at the idea that one can predict or manipulate how the “revolution” will turn out. His characters are lost souls trying to navigate a postcolonial world where racism, classism, and conflicting ideals create a festering unrest that no one knows how to fix.
- Guerrillas
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Read by Ron Butler
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Release Date: 10/16/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Half a Life
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Read by Neil Shah
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Release Date: 9/18/18
Formats: Digital Audy
In a narrative that moves with dreamlike swiftness from India to England to Africa, Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul has produced his finest novel to date, a bleakly resonant study of the fraudulent bargains that make up an identity.
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 Portuguese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray. Brilliantly orchestrated, at once elegiac and devastating in its portraits of colonial grandeur and pretension, Half a Life represents the pinnacle of Naipaul’s career.
- Half a Life
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Read by Neil Shah
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Release Date: 9/18/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- A Way in the World
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Read by Simon Vance
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Release Date: 9/04/18
Formats: Digital Audy
In a vastly innovative novel, Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul intertwines memory and history to create what is at once an autobiography and an ambitious fictional archaeology of colonialism.
Spanning continents and centuries and defying literary categories, A Way in the World tells intersecting stories whose protagonists include the disgraced and half-demented Sir Walter Raleigh who seeks El Dorado in the New World; the nineteenth-century insurgent Francisco Miranda, who becomes entangled in his own fantasies and borrowed ideas; and the doomed Blair, a present-day Caribbean revolutionary stranded in East Africa. Among these presences is a narrator who bears a telling resemblance to Naipaul himself: a Trinidadian writer of Indian ancestry and English residence boldly trying to come to terms with the mystery and transience that is his inheritance.
- A Way in the World
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Read by Simon Vance
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Release Date: 9/04/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Miguel Street
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Read by Ron Butler
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Release Date: 7/17/18
Formats: Digital Audy
“A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say ‘Slum!’ because he could see no more.” But to its residents this derelict corner of Trinidad’s capital 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.” There’s Man-man, who goes from running for public office to staging his own crucifixion, and the dreaded Big Foot, the bully with glass tear ducts. There’s the lovely Mrs. Hereira, in thrall to her monstrous husband. In this tender, funny early novel, V. S. Naipaul renders their lives (and the legends their neighbors construct around them) with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion.
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.
- Miguel Street
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Read by Ron Butler
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Release Date: 7/17/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Enigma of Arrival
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Read by Simon Vance
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Release Date: 7/17/18
Formats: Digital Audy
The story of a writer’s singular 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—this is perhaps Naipaul’s most autobiographical work. Yet it is also woven through with remarkable invention to make it a rich and complex novel.
- The Enigma of Arrival
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Read by Simon Vance
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Release Date: 7/17/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- In a Free State
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Read by Simon Vance, Vikas Adam, and Neil Shah
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Release Date: 5/08/18
Formats: Digital Audy
No writer has rendered our boundaryless, postcolonial 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.
On a road trip through Africa, two English people—Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious “compound wife”—are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin’s Uganda. And the farther Naipaul’s protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims. Alongside this Conradian tour de force are four incisive portraits of men seeking liberation far from home.
By turns funny and terrifying, sorrowful and unsparing, In a Free State is Naipaul at his best.
- In a Free State
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Read by Simon Vance, Vikas Adam, and Neil Shah
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Release Date: 5/08/18
Formats: Digital Audy