The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography Of V S Naipaul

Beginning with a richly detailed portrait of Naipaul's childhood in Trinidad, Patrick French gives us the boy born to an Indian family who possesses an extraordinary gift for writing and a forceful, visionary impulse. Fiercely ambitious, Naipaul wins a scholarship to Oxford at age seventeen. London in the 1950s wins him his first literary success, but homesickness almost defeats him. He copes with the aid of Patricia Hale, his first wife, an Englishwoman who will stand by him for four decades, even as he embarks on a twenty-four-year love affair that will feed his dizzying creativity. Researched with the full cooperation of its Nobel Prize—winning subject and informed by exclusive access to the subject's private papers and personal recollections, French's revelatory biography does full justice to an enigmatic genius.