A Bend in the River

In the "brilliant novel" ("The New York Times) V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man--an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.

V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After fouryears at Oxford he began to write, and has since published over twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including A House for Mr. Biswas, An Area of Darkness, Among the Believers, and The Enigma of Arrival, all available in Vintage.