A House for Mr Biswas

[A] great novel – Barack ObamaNaipaul’s masterpiece … [he has a] journalist’s eye for detail and a Dickensian gift for portraiture – Michiko KakutaniA work of great comic power – Anthony Burgess[A House for Mr Biswas] is a novel of epic length [and] formal perfection … it is one of the imperishable novels of the twentieth century – Teju ColeNaipaul has constructed a marvelous prose epic that matches the best nineteenth-century novels for richness of comic insight and final, tragic power * Newsweek *

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 non-fiction, 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.

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