The central novel from V.
S.
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..
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.
But now Africa is going sour on them.
They had once found liberation in Africa.
In a Free State is set in Africa, in a place like Uganda or Rwanda, and its two main characters are English.
Naipaul.
S.
This is what, many years after its first publication, my publisher is doing in this edition.' - V.
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.
The shorter pieces from these varied places were intended to throw a universal light on the African material.
There was to be a central novel, set in Africa, with shorter surrounding matter from other places. `In a Free State was conceived in 1969 as a sequence about displacement.
Naipaul's Booker Prize-winning narrative of displacement, published for the first time in a stand-alone edition.
The central novel from V.
S
