Magic Seeds - (Vintage International) by V S Naipaul (Paperback)

About the Book

Presenting a moving tale of a man searching for his life and fearing he has wasted it, this novel is also a testing study of the conflicts between the rich and the poor, and the struggles within each.

Book Synopsis

The Nobel Prize-winning author continues the story of Willie Chandran, the perennially dissatisfied and self-destructively naive protagonist of his bestselling Half a Life.

"The most essential English-language novelist of our time." --New York

Having left a wife and a livelihood in Africa, Willie is persuaded to return to his native India to join an underground movement on behalf of its oppressed lower castes. Instead he finds himself in the company of dilettantes and psychopaths, relentlessly hunted by police and spurned by the people he means to liberate. But this is only one stop in a quest for authenticity that takes in all the fanaticism and folly of the postmodern era. Moving with dreamlike swiftness from guerrilla encampment to prison cell, from the squalor of rural India to the glut and moral desolation of 1980s London, Magic Seeds is a novel of oracular power, dazzling in its economy and unblinking in its observations.

Review Quotes

"When Naipaul talks, we listen."
--The Atlantic Monthly

Praise for Half a Life
"Naipaul is a master of English prose and the prose of Half a Life is as clean and cold as a knife."
--J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize

"Here, sentence by sentence, is the consummate craftsmanship, the perception, the precision, the style."
--The Globe and Mail

About the Author

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.

His novels include A House for Mr Biswas, The Mimic Men, Guerrillas, A Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival. In 1971 he was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include Among the Believers, Beyond Belief, The Masque of Africa, and a trio of books about India: An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now.

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 died in 2018.