A House for Mr. Biswas by V S Naipaul

A House for Mr. Biswas by V S Naipaul

The book that turned the gentle satirist of the Caribbean into a major literary figure, in a hardcover edition with an introduction by Karl Miller.

His birth ill-omened, his life dominated by fitful, comic struggles and resentful truces with those to whom he is obligated, Mr. Mohun Biswas of Trinidad, toward the end of his forty-sixth year on earth, triumphantly purchases his own house and becomes his own man. Around this supremely simple story, V. S. Naipaul builds one of the few virtually perfect novels in our language, a book that is--in the balance struck between its small incidents and its large, overarching patterns, in the ironic beauty of its prose--at once compelling, mysterious, and classical. It is also one of the few novels in any language that transcend their own genre. By the end of A House for Mr. Biswas we are reading not only a tragicomic masterpiece of social manners in a postcolonial society but a tremendous parable about the individual self in its enslavement to time and change, and in its search for freedom.

V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He came to England on a scholarship in 1950. He spent four years at University College, Oxford, and began to write, in London, in 1954. He pursued no other profession.

His novels include A House for Mr Biswas, The Mimic Men, Guerrillas, A Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival. In 1971 he was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include Among the Believers, Beyond Belief, The Masque of Africa, and a trio of books about India: An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now.

In 1990, V.S. Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature; in 1993, he was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He lived with his wife Nadira and cat Augustus in Wiltshire, and died in 2018.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780140030259
ISBN 10	0140030255
Title	A House for Mr. Biswas
Author	V S Naipaul
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Penguin Books Ltd
Year published	1969-10-01
Number of pages	592
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable