RESULTS

This title is an account of the author's journeys through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia.'The believers he encountered are the Muslims he met on those journeys, young men and women battling to regain the original purity of their faith in the hope of restoring order to a chaotic world.

When Salim, a young Indian man, is offered a small business in Central Africa, he accepts. As he strives to establish himself, he becomes closely involved with the fluid and dangerous politics of the newly-dependent state.

Taking its title from a picture by surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico, this is the story of a young Indian from the Crown Colony of Trinidad, who arrives in post-imperial England. He observes the gradual but profound changes wrought on the English countryside by the march of "progress".

A devastatingly moving and often very funny novel from a masterful voice. In a corner of India untouched by anti-colonial agitation Willie Chandran's father stood at odds with the world - aspiring to greatness while living the dreary life marked out for him by his ancestors. In an attempt to defy his past he lives with a low-caste woman, only to find himself at the mercy of his own fury. From this unhappy union the compelling character of Willie Chandran emerges: oddly like his father, naively eager to find something that will place him both in and apart from the world. Willie is drawn to England and the immigrant community of post-war London, its dingy West End clubs and sexual encounters. But it is his first experience of love that may bring him the fulfillment he so desperately seeks. His wife Ana leads him to her homeland in Portuguese Africa, whose inhabitants are uncertainly living out the last days of colonialism. Naipaul delineates the relationship between father and son with wonderful clarity and compassion; and the comic brilliance of the London scenes and penetrating descriptions of Africa are hard to beat.

Naipaul's Booker Prize winning novel In A Free State is set in an imaginary state in Africa against a background of civil conflict. The book travels from America to London to Africa. The first third focuses on the fortunes of Santosh, a young Indian servant, at the mercy of his dreams, of his employers and of the countries in which he is plunged.
We then move into the world of expats in Africa, of government officers and radio people, attempting to understand the country they have found themselves in, to match their ideas to reality, 'In the end you don't know what you feel about anything'. And always, in the background the threat of violence looms. The voices in this novel are breathtakingly vivid, the feelings of the characters portrayed with an intelligence and sensitivity that is rarely seen in contemporary writing. Dennis Potter described the book as one 'of such lucid complexity and such genuine insight, so deft and deep, that it somehow manages to agitate, charm, amuse and excuse the reader all at the same pitch of experience'

In these 11 pieces, V.S. Naipaul charts more than half-a-century of personal inquiry into the mysteries of written expression and of fiction in particular. Here are his boyhood experiences of reading books and his first, youthful efforts at writing them. This collection also shows the early glimmers and evolution of ideas about the proper relation of particular literary forms to particular cultures and identities. Here, too, is Naipaul's famous comment on his putative literary forebear Conrad and, a less familiar but no less intriguing, preface to the only book Naipaul's father ever published. Finally, in his celebrated Nobel Address, 'Two Worlds', Naipaul reflects on the full scope of his career, rounding off the volume as an intellectual autobiography.

Willy Chandra - whom we first met in Half a Life - is a man who has allowed one identity after another to be thrust upon him. Now, in his early 40s, after a peripatetic life, he succumbs to the demanding encouragement of his sister - and his own listlessness - and joins an underground movement in India ostensibly devoted to unfettering the lower castes. But seven years of revolutionary campaigns and several years in jail convince him that the revolution 'had nothing to do with the village people we said we were fighting for,' and he feels himself further than ever 'from his own history and...from the ideas of himself that might have come to him with that history'. When he returns to England where, 30 years before, his psychological and physical wanderings began, he finds the fruit of another unexpected social revolution (more magic seeds), and he comes to see himself as a man 'serving an endless prison sentence' - a revelation that may finally release him into his true self. Magic Seeds is a masterpiece, written with all the depth and resonance, the clarity of vision and precision of language that are the hallmarks of this brilliant writer.

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.

V S. Naipaul's first novel - funny, endlessly inventive and brilliantly imagined The Mystic Masseur traces the story of Ganesh who, at the beginning of the novel is a struggling masseur when, as the narrator puts it, 'masseurs were ten a penny in Trinidad'. From failed primary school teacher and masseur to author, revered mystic and MBE, his is a journey memorable for its hilarious and bewildering success. Naipaul's clarity of style, humorous touch and powerful characterisation are all in evidence in this first book. This is an ideal beginning to readers new to Naipaul's writing.

This is a reflective journey in which V. S. Naipaul travels through the American South in the 1980s. He writes of his encounters with politicians, rednecks, farmers, writers and ordinary men and women, both black and white.