num_pages: 256
description: No writer has rendered our boundariless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. A perfect case in point is this riveting novel, a masterful and stylishly rendered narrative of emigration, dislocation, and dread, accompanied by four supporting narratives. In the beginning it is just a car trip through Africa. Two English people--Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys, and Linda, a supercilious compound wife -- are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims. Alongside this Conradian tour de force are four incisive portraits of men seeking liberation far from home. By turns funny and terrifying, sorrowful and unsparing, In A Free State is Naipaul at his best.
language: English
title: In a Free State
titlecomplete: In a Free State
genres: 20th Century, Short Stories, Nobel Prize, Africa, Literary Fiction, Novels, Literature, India, Classics, Fiction
ratings_count: 4823
places: Africa
awards: awardedAt: 31564800000
name: Booker Prize, awardedAt: 1514793600000
name: Golden Man Booker Prize
publisher: Vintage