Half a Life by V S Naipaul

Half a Life

V S Naipaul

Intriguing and intimate. V.S. Naipaul''s characters are not heroic but always fascinating in their reactions to life''s experiences. I love the way he writes. Unsurprising that a story so convincingly real should feel biographical.

Extract
And that was how, when he was twenty, Willie Chandran,the mission school student who had not completed his education, with no idea of what he wanted to do,except to get away from what he knew, and yet with very little idea of what lay outside what he knew , only with the fantasies of the Hollywood films of the thirties and forties that he had seen at the mission school, went to London.
Parallels
  • Scarlet Song by Mariama Ba
  • By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah
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Violence
Explicit sexual content