A Bend in the River: Introduction by Patrick Marnham
Naipaul, V. S.; Marnham, Patrick
Language: English
Published by Everyman's Library, 2019
- Hardcover
- New

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Add to basketSeller Inventory # 9781101908198
- Title
- A Bend in the River: Introduction by Patrick Marnham
- Author
- Naipaul, V. S.; Marnham, Patrick
- Publisher
- Everyman's Library
- Publication year
- 2019
- Condition
- New
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 110190819X
- ISBN 13
- 9781101908198
Widely hailed as V. S. Naipaul's greatest work, this novel takes us into the life of a young Indian man who moves to an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation.
Salim is doubly an outsider in his new home--an unnamed country that resembles the Congo--by virtue of his origins in a community of Indian merchants on the coast of East Africa. Uncertain of his future, he has come to take possession of a local trading post he has naively purchased sight unseen. But what Salim discovers on his arrival is a ghost town, reduced to ruins in the wake of the recently departed European colonizers and in the process of being reclaimed by the surrounding forest. Salim struggles to build his business against a backdrop of growing chaos, conflict, ignorance, and poverty.
His is a journey into the heart of Africa, into the same territory explored by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness nearly eighty years earlier--but witnessed this time from the other side of the tragedy of colonization. Salim discovers that the nation's violent legacy persists, through the rise of a dictator who calls himself the people's savior but whose regime is built on fear and lies. In A Bend in the River, short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1979, in Naipaul gives us a convincing and disturbing vision of a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past.
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.
"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
PATRICK MARNHAM is an English writer, known for his biographies of Diego Rivera and Georges Simenon. He has served as literary editor of The Spectator and Paris correspondent for The Independent. He is the recipient of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Marsh Biography Award.
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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