In a Free State

Winner of the Booker Prize 1971 and nominated for the Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018.

A young Indian servant in Washington. An Asian West Indian in London. Both are far from home and both are desperately trying to build a new life in a deeply unfamiliar world. In between them lies the landscape of an unnamed country, a brutal place reminiscent of Idi Amin-s Uganda. This central story is about those who once thought of Africa as liberating, but now find themselves in an increasingly harsher reality.

Winner of the Booker Prize in 1971, In a Free State is one of Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul-s many towering literary achievements. It is a story of the desperation and heartbreak we find in those who are displaced and who try, often in vain, to make a home in their new surroundings. Frightening, disquieting and merciless, this is one of Naipaul-s greatest novels: fraught but full of pity.

Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very b