Set on a troubled Caribbean island - where Asians, Africans, Americans and former British colonials co-exist in a state of suppressed hysteria - Guerrillas is a novel of colonialism and revolution. A white man arrives with his mistress, an Englishwoman influenced by fantasies of native power and sexuality, unaware of the consequences of her actions. Together with a leader of the ‘revolution’, they act out a gripping drama of death, sexual violence, and spiritual impotence. Guerrillas depicts a convulsion in public life, and ends in private violence. Place and people are evoked with an intensity unrivalled elsewhere. The novel comes with extraordinary force from the centre of a profound moral awareness of the world’s plight. ‘Remarkable . . . Guerrillas is a brilliant novel in every way, and it shimmers with artistic certainty’ – The New York Times‘Impeccable prose, precise, austere . . . Guerrillas seems to me Naipaul’s Heart of Darkness: a brilliant artist’s anatomy of emptiness, and of despair’ – ObserverNow part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.
