A Bend in the River, Hardcover

Widely hailed as Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul's greatest work, A Bend in the River takes us deeply into the life of a young Indian man who moves to an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation.

Salim is doubly an outsider in his new home--an unnamed country that resembles the Congo--by virtue of his origins in a community of Indian merchants on the coast of East Africa. Uncertain of his future, he has come to take possession of a local trading post he has naively purchased sight unseen. But what Salim discovers on his arrival is a ghost town, reduced to ruins in the wake of the recently departed European colonizers and in the process of being reclaimed by the surrounding forest. Salim struggles to build his business against a backdrop of growing chaos, conflict, ignorance, and poverty. His is a journey into the heart of Africa, into the same territory explored by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness nearly eighty years earlier--but witnessed this time from the other side of the tragedy of colonization. Salim discovers that the nation's violent legacy persists, through the rise of a dictator who calls himself the people's savior but whose regime is built on fear and lies. In this haunting masterpiece of postcolonial literature, short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1979, Naipaul gives us a convincing and disturbing vision of a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past.

V. S. NAIPAUL was born in Trinidad in 1932. He came to England in 1950, spent four years at Oxford, and began to write in 1954 in London. His novels include A House for Mr Biswas, The Enigma of Arrival, and In a Free State, which won the Booker Prize. His works of nonfiction include Among the Believers, Beyond Belief, and The Masque of Africa. In 1990, Naipaul received a knighthood and in 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in 2018.

PATRICK MARNHAM is an English writer, known for his biographies of Diego Rivera and Georges Simenon. He has served as literary editor of The Spectator and Paris correspondent for The Independent. He is the recipient of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Marsh Biography Award.