India: An Area Of Darkness, India

A collection of three classic books by V. S. Naipaul, with an introduction from Paul Theroux, author of The Great Railway Bazaar.

Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul first visited India in 1962 at the age of twenty-nine, hoping to settle the ghosts of a painful ancestral past. That journey was the first in what would become a decades-long project. An Area of Darkness chronicles the author’s initial visit as estrangement gives way to connections and conversations. Prompted by the Emergency of 1975, India: A Wounded Civilization presents an intellectual portrait of a country whose people are no longer so willing to speak or bear witness. India: A Million Mutinies Now captures a panorama of voices and stories fifteen years later, at another moment of national upheaval.

Born of Naipaul’s wish to see for himself the homeland from which he was twice displaced, India emerges as an invaluable account of a nation in times of dramatic change: acutely observant, tender, at once brilliantly composed and vividly clear-sighted.