The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book: and Other Comic Inventions

Description

V.S. Naipaul's legendary command of broad comedy and acute social observation is on abundant display in these classic works of fiction - two novels and a collection of stories. The Suffrage of Elvira is Naipaul's hilarious take on an electoral campaign in the back country of Trinidad, where the candidates tactics include blatant vote-buying and supernatural sabotage. The eponymous protagonist of Mr Stone and the Knights Companion is an ageing Englishman of ponderously regular habits whose life is thrown into upheaval by a sudden marriage and an unanticipated professional advancement. And the stories in A Flag on the Island take us from a Chinese bakery in Trinidad to a rooming house in London. Unfailingly stylish, filled with intelligence and feeling, here is the work of a writer who can do just about anything that can be done with language.

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 The Masque of Africa, and a collection of letters, Between a Father and Son. In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.