Owning a small portion of the Trinidad earth and a respectable house of his own is the dream that sustains Mohun Biswas through a life of frustration and despair after he marries into the domineering Tulsi family.

A collection of nonfiction writings includes discussions of the writers who have influenced the author's literary career, his early encounters with literary culture, the impact of the works of Gandhi and other Indian writers, and reflections on his life and family history.

Nobel Prize-winning author Naipaul spirals outward from the central African country of Uganda, to Nigeria, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Gabon, and concluding in South Africa, to unearth in six chapters a sense of African ancestral belief and practice.

Willie Chandran flees the heritage of his mixed class birth in India for the bohemian life of a writer in 1950s London. He falls in love with a woman and returns with her to Africa, living through the last days of colonialism.

A former hero of the South African resistance and his English mistress arrive on a troubled Caribbean island, where their involvement with a young mulatto revolutionary leader leads to violence.

For forty years V.S. Naipaul has been traveling and, through his writing, creating one of the most wide-ranging and sustained meditations on our world. Now, for the first time, his finest shorter pieces of reflection and reportage are collected in one volume. With an abiding faith in the redemptive power of modernity balanced by a sense of wonder about the past, Naipaul has explored an astonishing variety of societies and peoples through the many-sided...

After a recent civil war, a country in the interior of Africa is under a new President, whose insane energy and crudity have made his power felt everywhere including an isolated village at a bend in the river.