The World Is What It Is by Patrick French

The World Is What It Is by Patrick French

The first major biography of V.S. Naipaul, the controversial and enigmatic Nobel laureate: a stunning writer whose only stated ambition was greatness, in pursuit of which goal nothing else was sacred.

Beginning in rich detail in Trinidad, where Naipaul was born into an Indian family, Patrick French skillfully examines Naipaul's life within a displaced community and his fierce ambition at school. He describes how, on scholarship at Oxford, homesickness and depression struck with great force; the ways in which Naipaul's first wife helped him to cope and their otherwise fraught marriage; and Naipaul's struggles throughout subsequent uncertainties in England, including his twenty-five-year-long affair.

Naipaul's extraordinary gift--producing, uniquely, masterpieces of both fiction and nonfiction--is most of all born of a forceful, visionary impulse, whose roots French traces with a sympathetic brilliance and devastating insight.

Patrick French was born in 1966 in England and attended Edinburgh University to study literature. Younghusband, Liberty or Death, Tibet, Tibet, and The World Is What It Is, which earned the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hawthornden Prize, are among his works. French has won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. He is based in London.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781400044054
ISBN 10	1400044057
Title	The World Is What It Is
Author	Patrick French
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Knopf Publishing Group
Year published	2008-11-04
Number of pages	554
Prizes	Winner of National Book Critics Circle Award (Biography) 2008
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.