AN AREA OF DARKNESS

AN AREA OF DARKNESS
HIS DISCOVERY OF INDIA
 
V.S. NAIPAUL
The first book in V.S. Naipaul’s acclaimed Indian trilogy—with a new preface by the author
An Area of Darkness is V. S. Naipaul’s semi-autobiographical account – at once painful and hilarious, but always thoughtful and considered – of his first visit to India, the land of his forebears. He was twenty-nine years old; he stayed for a year. From the moment of his inauspicious arrival in Prohibition-dry Bombay, bearing whisky and cheap brandy, he experienced a cultural estrangement from the subcontinent. It became for him a land of myths, an area of darkness closing up behind him as he travelled . . .

The experience was not a pleasant one, but the pain the author suffered was creative rather than numbing, and engendered a masterful work of literature that provides a revelation both of India and of himself: a displaced person who paradoxically possesses a stronger sense of place than almost anyone.
‘Brilliant’—Observer

‘His narrative skill is spectacular. One returns with pleasure to the slow hand-in-hand revelations of both India and himself’—The Times

‘A masterpiece of travel-writing’—Paul Theroux
V.S. NAIPAUL
V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession. He has published more than twenty books of fiction and non-fiction, including Half a Life, A House for Mr Biswas, A Bend in the River and, most recently, a collection of correspondence, Letters Between a Father and Son, and The Masque of Africa. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.