num_pages: 224
description: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In a narrative that moves with dreamlike swiftness from India to England to Africa, the Nobel Prize-winning author produced his finest novel, a bleakly resonant study of the fraudulent bargains that make up an identity."A masterpiece." — Los Angeles Times Book ReviewThe son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portugese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray. Brilliantly orchestrated, at once elegiac and devastating in its portraits of colonial grandeur and pretension, Half a Life represents the pinnacle of Naipaul's career.
language: English
title: Half a Life
titlecomplete: Half a Life
genres: Historical Fiction, Nobel Prize, Africa, Literary Fiction, Novels, Literature, Indian Literature, India, Fiction, Contemporary
ratings_count: 4241
series: Willie Chandran
awards: awardedAt: 978336000000
name: Booker Prize
category: Longlist
publisher: Vintage International