<p><b>The central novel from V.S. Naipaul’s Booker Prize-winning narrative of displacement, published for the first time in a stand-alone edition.</b></p><p>‘<i>In a Free State</i> was conceived in 1969 as a sequence about displacement. There was to be a central novel, set in Africa, with shorter surrounding matter from other places. The shorter pieces from these varied places were intended to throw a universal light on the African material. But then, as the years passed and the world changed, and I felt myself less of an oddity as a writer, I grew to feel that the central novel was muffled and diminished by the surrounding material and I began to think that the novel should be published on its own. This is what, many years after its first publication, my publisher is doing in this edition.’ - V. S. Naipaul.</p><p> <i>In a Free State</i> is set in Africa, in a place like Uganda or Rwanda, and its two ma
