Magic Seeds

Description

From V S Naipaul - a spare, searing novel about identity and idealism, and their ability to shape or destroy us.Willy Chandra - whom we first met in Half a Life - is a man who has allowed one identity after another to be thrust upon him. Now, in his early 40s, after a peripatetic life, he succumbs to the demanding encouragement of his sister - and his own listlessness - and joins an underground movement in India ostensibly devoted to unfettering the lower castes. But seven years of revolutionary campaigns and several years in jail convince him that the revolution "had nothing to do with the village people we said we were fighting for," and he feels himself further than ever "from his own history and... from the ideas of himself that might have come to him with that history." When he returns to England where, 30 years before, his psychological and physical wanderings began, he finds the fruit of another unexpected social revolution (more magic seeds), and he comes to see himself as a man "serving an endless prison sentence" - a revelation that may finally release him into his true self. Magic Seeds is a masterpiece, written with all the depth and resonance, the clarity of vision and precision of language that are the hallmarks of this brilliant writer.

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 nonfiction, including Half a Life, A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, and a collection of letters, Between Father and Son. In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

A radical further step in one of the great imaginative careers of our time . . . Magic Seeds demands our attention, and nothing more authoritative will be published this year. -- Philip Hensher * Daily Telegraph * A novel that has subtlety, originality, shattering emotion and unmatched precision of language. * Observer *