In a Free State: A Novel with two supporting narratives

by V.S.Naipaul (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2011

  $11.40

  Winner of the Booker Prize 1971 and nominated for the Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018.

  In a Free State tells the story first of an Indian servant in Washington, who becomes an American citizen but feels he has ceased to be a part of the flow. Then of a disturbed Asian West Indian in London who, in jail for murder, has never really known where he is. Then the central novel moves to Africa, to a fictional country somewhere like Uganda or Rwanda.

  The novel's central characters once found Africa liberating, but now it has gone sour on them. The land is no longer safe, and at a time of tribal conflict they have to make the long drive to the safety of their compound. At the end of this drive - the narrative tight, wonderfully constructed, the formal and precise language always instilled with violence and rage - we know everything about the English characters, the African country and the Idi Amin-like future awaiting it. This is one of V. S. Naipaul's greatest novels, hard but full of pity.

  This is a story about displacement, the yearning for the good place in someone else's land and the attendant heartache.

• Used

  Paperback
  2011

  $3.22

  'In a Free State was conceived in 1969 as a sequence about displacement. There was to be a central novel, set in Africa, with shorter surrounding matter from other places. The shorter pieces from these varied places were intended to throw a universal light on the African material. But then, as the years passed and the world changed, and I felt myself less of an oddity as a writer, I grew to feel that the central novel was muffled and diminished by the surrounding material and I began to think that the novel should be published on its own. This is what, many years after its first publication, my publisher is doing in this edition.' V. S. Naipaul. In a Free State is set in Africa, in a place like Uganda or Rwanda, and its two main characters are English. They had once found liberation in Africa. But now Africa is going sour on them. The land is no longer safe, and at a time of tribal conflict they have to make a long drive to the safety of their compound. At the end of this drive -- the narrative tight, wonderfully constructed, the formal and precise language always instilled with violence and rage -- we know everything about the English characters, the African country, and the Idi Amin-like future awaiting it. This is one of V. S. Naipaul's greatest novels, hard but full of pity. It won the Booker Prize, in its original edition, in 1971.

• New

  Paperback
  2002

  $16.56