In a Free State
3.5 based on 3538 ratings & 241 reviews on Goodreads.com
Paperback PaperbackEbookEbookPaperback Buy Amazon Blackwell's Book Depository Hive Waterstones WH Smith Wordery Foyles
2018 Nominee
Golden Man Booker Prize
The central novel from V.S. Naipaul's Booker Prize-winning narrative of displacement, published for the first time in a stand-alone edition.
'In a Free State was conceived in 1969 as a sequence about displacement. There was to be a central novel, set in Africa, with shorter surrounding matter from other places. The shorter pieces from these varied places were intended to throw a universal light on the African material. But then, as the years passed and the world changed, and I felt myself less of an oddity as a writer, I grew to feel that the central novel was muffled and diminished by the surrounding material and I began to think that the novel should be published on its own. This is what, many years after its first publication, my publisher is doing in this edition.' - V. S. Naipaul.
In a Free State is set in Africa, in a place like Uganda or Rwanda, and its two main characters are English. They had once found liberation in Africa. But now Africa is going sour on them. The land is no longer safe, and at a time of tribal conflict they have to make a long drive to the safety of their compound. At the end of this drive – the narrative tight, wonderfully constructed, the formal and precise language always instilled with violence and rage – we know everything about the English characters, the African country, and the Idi Amin-like future awaiting it.
Books by V. S. Naipaul
The Masque of Africa
India: Essays
The Indian Trilogy
Magic Seeds
The Enigma of Arrival
A Turn in the South
The Writer and the World
Letters Between a Father and Son
India: A Million Mutinies Now
Among the Believers
An Area of Darkness
Half a Life
The Mystic Masseur
A Writer's People
India: A Wounded Civilization
A Bend in the River
Literary Occasions
The Loss of El Dorado
A Way in the World
The Middle Passage
The Mimic Men
The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book
Miguel Street