Description

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 postcolonial 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 married to her. But in spite of his endless setbacks, Mr Biswas is determined to achieve independence, and so he begins the gruelling struggle to buy a home of his own.

Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.

Publisher Review

[A] great novel — Barack Obama Naipaul’s masterpiece . . . [he has a] journalist’s eye for detail and a Dickensian gift for portraiture — Michiko Kakutani A work of great comic power — Anthony Burgess [A House for Mr Biswas] is a novel of epic length [and] formal perfection . . . it is one of the imperishable novels of the twentieth century — Teju Cole Naipaul has constructed a marvelous prose epic that matches the best nineteenth-century novels for richness of comic insight and final, tragic power * Newsweek *