'A Tolstoyan spirit...The so-called third World has produced no more brilliant literary artist' - John Updike, "New Yorker". Born of Indian heritage, raised in the British-dependent Caribbean island of Isabella, and educated in England, forty-year-old Ralph Singh has spent a lifetime struggling against the torment of cultural displacement. Now in exile from his native country, he has taken up residence at a quaint hotel in a London suburb, where he is writing his memoirs in an attempt to impose order on a chaotic existence. His memories lead him to recognize the cultural paradoxes and tainted fantasies of his colonial childhood and later life: his attempts to fit in at school, his short-lived marriage to an ostenatious white woman. But it is the return of Isabella and his subsequent immersion in the roiling political atmosphere of a newly self-governing nation - every kind of racial fantasy taking wing - that ultimately provide Singh with the necessary insight to discover the crux of his disillusionment. 'Ambitious and successful...Extremely perceptive' - "The Times".
'The sweep of Naipaul's imagination, the brilliant fictional frame that expresses it, are in my view eithout equal today' - "New York Times Book Review".
- ISBN10 0330487108
- ISBN13 9780330487108
- Publish Date 10 May 2002 (first published April 1967)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 18 July 2011
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Pan Macmillan
- Imprint Picador
- Format Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
- Pages 288
- Language English