A House for Mr Biswas

Description

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF PICADOR BOOKS One of BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World. Heart-rending and darkly comic, V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels, a classic that evokes a man's quest for autonomy against the backdrop of post-colonial Trinidad. Mr Biswas has been told since the day of his birth that misfortune will follow him - and so it has. Meaning only to avoid punishment, he causes the death of his father and the dissolution of his family. Wanting simply to flirt with a beautiful woman, he ends up marrying her. But in spite of endless setbacks, Mr Biswas is determined to achieve independence, and so he begins the gruelling struggle to buy a home of his own. Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best of modern literature.

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. 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.

A work of great comic power qualified with firm and unsentimental compassion -- Anthony Burgess A marvellous prose epic that matches the best nineteenth-century novels * Newsweek * Naipaul's masterpiece...[he has] a journalist's eye for detail and a Dickensian gift for portraiture -- Michiko Kakutani